Irreversible Investment With Uncertainty And Scale Economies

Author : Adam Yonce
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (769 download)

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Download or read book Uncertain Growth Cycles, Corporate Investment, and Dynamic Hedging written by Adam Yonce and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the theory of finance, uncertainty plays a crucial role. Economists often use the terms uncertainty and volatility interchangeably, yet volatility is not the only form of uncertainty. Firms face uncertainty about whether the economy is in an expansionary or recessionary state, industries face regulatory uncertainty, and individuals face uncertainty about risk premia. In this dissertation, I consider the role that uncertainty about growth rates, regulatory policy, and risk premia play in the investment decisions of firms and individuals. The key theme linking the three chapters is learning in dynamic environments. In Chapter 1, I study the effects of demand growth uncertainty on corporate investment decisions. In particular, how does uncertainty about the state of the economy and the state of demand growth affect a firm's decision to allocate capital to irreversible investment projects? In the model, firms are able to choose both the timing and scale of their investments, and the optimal scale will depend on the unobserved state of demand growth. This second decision gives rise to an incentive to delay investment that does not exist in standard real option models: When investment is irreversible, firms risk allocating a sub-optimal level of capital to a project. Theoretically, I show how this incentive to delay is closely linked to the benefits of learning about the economy. Empirically, using estimated probabilities filtered from GDP growth, I find that 1) beliefs about the economy inform corporate investment decisions, and 2) the relationship between investment and beliefs is quadratic. In Chapter 2, I study an empirical extension of the model. Many industries in the United States face regulatory uncertainty, and a natural conjecture is that increased regulatory uncertainty has a dampening effect on investment if 1) regulatory policy affects the cash flows of the firm, 2) firms have flexibility over the scale of their investments, and 3) regulatory uncertainty resolves quickly. While regulatory uncertainty is not observable, I consider two proxies: A variable indicating Presidential election years, and a variable indicating divided government. The former is meant to capture policy uncertainty associated with the possibility of a change in government, while the latter is meant to capture policy uncertainty associated with ideological variance. Empirically, both measures are associated with a decrease in corporate investment rates, consistent with the theoretical framework. The second purpose of this chapter is to highlight the dangers of making inferences about investment using inconsistent estimators and regressions that fail to account for plausible alternative hypotheses. Previous work linking investment to the political cycle relies on least squares estimators that are inconsistent because the firm-specific control variables are endogenous to the investment decision. For a specific sub-sample of non-manufacturing firms, I show that least squares estimates easily reject the null hypothesis, while consistent first-difference estimates fail to do so. Finally, I include a control for the fiscal environment of the federal government, which helps to uncover important dynamics between investment, the budget deficit, and the election cycle. In chapter 3, I consider the currency hedging problem of a risk-averse international investor who faces an unobservable currency risk premium. A non-zero risk premium introduces a speculative motive for holding foreign currency in the optimal portfolio, and a time-varying risk premium introduces a market-timing strategy. Uncertainty about the stochastic properties of the risk premium significantly tames both the speculative and market timing components, especially at long investment horizons, and the optimal hedge approaches a complete hedge as risk aversion and the investment horizon increase. However, an investor who ignores the risk premium and fully hedges foreign investments faces a substantial opportunity cost because she forgoes the benefits of dynamic learning.