IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/gunwpe/0449.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Pursuing the Wrong Options? Adjustment Costs and the Relationship between Uncertainty and Capital Accumulation

Author

Listed:
  • Bond, Stephen R.

    () (Nuffield College, Department of Economics and Centre for Business Taxation, University of Oxford, UK and Institute for Fiscal Studies)

  • Söderbom, Måns

    () (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

  • Wu, Guiying

    () (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Abstract

bel and Eberly (1999) show that the effect of uncertainty on long run capital accumulation is ambiguous in a real options model with irreversible investment. We show that a higher level of uncertainty tends to reduce expected capital stock levels in a model with strictly convex adjustment costs. Simulations suggest that this negative impact of uncertainty on capital accumulation may be substantial. We also provide some intuition for this result.

Suggested Citation

  • Bond, Stephen R. & Söderbom, Måns & Wu, Guiying, 2010. "Pursuing the Wrong Options? Adjustment Costs and the Relationship between Uncertainty and Capital Accumulation," Working Papers in Economics 449, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0449
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/22358
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andrew B. Abel, 2002. "On the Invariance of the Rate of Return to Convex Adjustment Costs," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 5(3), pages 586-601, July.
    2. Hayashi, Fumio & Inoue, Tohru, 1991. "The Relation between Firm Growth and Q with Multiple Capital Goods: Theory and Evidence from Panel Data on Japanese Firms," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(3), pages 731-753, May.
    3. Avinash K. Dixit & Robert S. Pindyck, 1994. "Investment under Uncertainty," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 5474.
    4. Janice Eberly & Sergio Rebelo & Nicolas Vincent, 2008. "Investment and Value: A Neoclassical Benchmark," Cahiers de recherche 08-03, HEC Montréal, Institut d'économie appliquée.
    5. Andrew B. Abel & Janice C. Eberly, 1996. "Optimal Investment with Costly Reversibility," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 63(4), pages 581-593.
    6. Abel, Andrew B. & Eberly, Janice C., 1999. "The effects of irreversibility and uncertainty on capital accumulation," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(3), pages 339-377, December.
    7. Nicholas Bloom, 2009. "The Impact of Uncertainty Shocks," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 77(3), pages 623-685, May.
    8. Lawrence H. Summers, 1981. "Taxation and Corporate Investment: A q-Theory Approach," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 12(1), pages 67-140.
    9. Russell W. Cooper & John C. Haltiwanger, 2006. "On the Nature of Capital Adjustment Costs," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 73(3), pages 611-633.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Guiying Laura Wu, 2015. "Investment Frictions and the Aggregate Output Loss in China," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 77(3), pages 437-465, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Uncertainty; real options; adjustment costs; capital accumulation.;

    JEL classification:

    • C15 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Statistical Simulation Methods: General
    • D92 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Intertemporal Firm Choice, Investment, Capacity, and Financing
    • E22 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Investment; Capital; Intangible Capital; Capacity

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0449. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Marie Andersson). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/naiguse.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.