This article discusses the history underlying the new literature, describes some of what has been learned thus far, and looks ahead towards making further progress

We survey recent microeconometric research on investment and employment that has used panel data on individual firms or plants. We focus on model specification and econometric estimation issues, but we also review some of the main empirical findings. We discuss advantages and limitations of microeconomic data in this context. We briefly review the neoclassical theory of the demand for capital and labour, on which most of the econometric models of investment and employment that we consider are based. We pay particular attention to dynamic factor demand models, based on the assumption that there are costs of adjustment, which have played a prominent role especially in the microeconometric literature on investment. With adjustment costs, current choices depend on expectations of future conditions. We discuss the challenges that this raises for econometric model specification, and some of the solutions that have been adopted. We also discuss estimation issues that

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This paper shows that with (partial) irreversibility higher uncertainty reduces the responsiveness of investment to demand shocks. Uncertainty increases real option values making firms more cautious when investing or disinvesting. This is confirmed both numerically for a model with a rich mix of adjustment costs, time-varying uncertainty, and aggregation over investment decisions and time and also empirically for a panel of manufacturing firms. These “cautionary effects” of uncertainty are large—going from the lower quartile to the upper quartile of the uncertainty distribution typically halves the first year investment response to demand shocks. This implies the responsiveness of firms to any given policy stimulus may be much weaker in periods of high uncertainty, such as after the 1973 oil crisis and September 11, 2001.

What is the impact of time-varying business uncertainty on economic activity? Using partly confidential business survey data from the U.S. and Germany in structural VARs, we find that positive innovations to business uncertainty lead to prolonged declines in economic activity. In contrast, their high-frequency impact is small. We find no evidence of the “wait-and-see”-effect – large declines of economic activity on impact and subsequent fast rebounds – that the recent literature associates with positive uncertainty shocks. Rather, positive innovations to business uncertainty have effects similar to negative business confidence innovations. Once we control for their low-frequency effect, we find little statistically or economically significant impact of uncertainty innovations on activity. We argue that high uncertainty events are a mere epiphenomenon of bad economic times: recessions breed uncertainty.

A theory of the optimal number of banking relationships is developed and tested using matched bank-firm data. According to the theory, relationship banks may be unable to continue funding profitable projects owing to internal problems and a firm may thus have to refinance from non-relationship banks. The latter, however, face an adverse selection problem, as they do not know the quality of the project, and may refuse to lend. In these circumstances, multiple banking can reduce the probability of an early liquidation of the project. The empirical evidence supports the predictions of the model. * International Monetary Fund, Universita' di Bologna, and Universita' di Sassari and Ente Luigi Einaudi, respectively. We wish to thank Marco Da Rin, Mathias Dewatripont, Giovanni Ferri, Andrea Generale, Andrea Gerali, Giorgio Gobbi, Raghuram Rajan, Andrei Shleifer, Alessandro Sembenelli, and participants to seminars at the Chicago FED, Igier, the University of Brescia, the BIS, and to the 1997 ...

Hunter, NBER, Northwestern, and Oxford for useful comments. Financial support from the ESRC Centre for Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies is gratefully acknowledged. The views presented are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or its staff We investigate the empirical relationship between company investment and measures of uncertainty, controlling for the effect of expected future profitability on current investment decisions. We consider three measures of uncertainty derived from (1) the volatility in the firm’s stock returns; (2) disagreement among securities analysts in their forecasts of the firm’s future profits; and (3) the variance of forecast errors in analysts ’ forecasts of the firm’s future profits. We consider two controls for expected profitability: (1) a standard measure of Brainard-Tobin’s q constructed from the firm’s stock market valuation; and (2) an alternative measure of the q ratio constructed from discounted forecasts of the firm’s future profits. Our sample consists of publicly-traded U.S. companies that were tracked by two

We investigate the impact of measures of uncertainty on firms ’ capital investment behavior using a panel of U.S. firms. Increases in firmspecific and CAPM-based measures have a significant negative effect on investment spending, while market-based uncertainty has a positive impact.

... that patents have an economically and statistically significant impact on firm-level productivity and market value. While patenting feeds into market values immediately it appears to have a slower effect on productivity. This generates valuable real options because patents provide exclusive rights to develop new innovations, enabling firms to delay investments. Higher market uncertainty, which increases the value of real options, reduces the impact of new patents on productivity. If the government's policy to reduce uncertainty is successful then this should increase the productivity of Britain's knowledge capital.

In this paper we assess the impact of a comprehensive range of macroeconomic and financial measures of uncertainty on business investment in the major industrial countries using Pooled Mean Group Panel Estimation. We discover a significant negative long run effect from both nominal and real exchange rate volatility using a GARCH (1,1) approach on aggregate investment for the G7. This is also found in poolable subgroups including all four larger European countries. Results for an adverse impact of uncertainty on investment are also found for volatility of long rates in recent years but not for inflation, share prices and industrial production. The results imply that to the extent that EMU favours lower exchange rate and long interest rate volatility, it will also be beneficial to investment.