Devaluating projects and the investment–uncertainty relationship

Sarkar (2000. On the investment–uncertainty relationship in a real options model. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 24, 219–225) analyzes the investment–uncertainty relationship in a real-options model demonstrating that the widely accepted conclusion that uncertainty harms investment can be reversed. Wong (2006. The effect of uncertainty on investment timing in a real options model. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, forthcoming) confirms this point showing that more uncertainty can reduce the expected time to exercise the investment option. This paper deals with such an issue and attempts to integrate both Sarkar's and Wong's analysis.For risk-neutral investors, we show that uncertainty can favor investment only if projects devaluate over time. This conclusion does not hold in a CAPM framework, where we demonstrate that the relationship uncertainty/investment can be positive (a) even when the investment threshold increases with uncertainty and (b) in the case of projects negatively correlated with the market portfolio.     

再造成本不确定性对再造投资的效应分析

本文在一定假设条件下,对进行产品制造和再造混合生产的垄断制造商建立两期模型,研究再造成本的不确定性对制造商再造投资和最优决策的影响效应。研究表明,在某些条件下,再造成本不确定性对再造投资具有一定促进作用。制造商可以根据自身条件,适当选择再造投资,文章也为其再造投资决策提供了依据。     

Investment decisions and debt financing under information uncertainty

This study examines how information uncertainty influences investment decisions. In contrast to prior studies, which assume no information uncertainty, our model includes a discrepancy in valuing debt between shareholders and debtholders at the time of debt issuance. We derive the values of corporate securities and the optimal investment threshold and coupon under information uncertainty. We show that compared with the absence of information uncertainty, debtholders value debt less than shareholders do, and hence, shareholders should contribute more investment funds. Debt financing restraints due to information uncertainty lead to delayed investment. We find that information uncertainty plays a mitigating role in shareholder-debtholder conflicts over investment policy. Moreover, the information uncertainty costs that shareholders incur increase sharply with the level of information uncertainty.     

Overinvestment,inflation uncertainty,and managerial overconfidence: Firm level analysis of Chinese corporations

We study corporate investment by considering both external economic factor and managerial behavior, in particular the dynamic interaction between inflation uncertainty and managerial overconfidence by employing a sample of Chinese companies. The empirical findings demonstrate that lower inflation uncertainty increases over-investment, and managerial overconfidence exacerbates such effect. Further analysis shows that over-investment in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is mainly driven by managerial overconfidence, and the negative association between inflation uncertainty and overinvestment is due to managerial overconfidence. The effect of managerial overconfidence is mute in non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs). In addition, we find asymmetric impact of inflation uncertainty on corporate over-investment during different economic cycles.     

汇率和需求不确定下跨国投资决策的实物期权分析

在对实物期权理论和跨国投资相关文献研究基础上,分析企业在汇率和需求不确定条件下跨国投资的风险和期权特征,构建了基于实物期权思想的跨国投资决策模型。通过数值求解,分析了跨国投资情况下,企业拥有的实物期权价值。     

Economic policy uncertainty and capital structure choice: Evidence from China

This paper studies how economic policy uncertainty affects corporate capital structure for Chinese listed firms from 2003 to 2013. We show that as the degree of economic policy uncertainty increases, firms tend to lower their leverage ratios. However, firms that are from regions with lower degrees of marketization, are state-owned or have prior bank-firm relationships mitigate the negative effect of policy uncertainty. Moreover, we provide consistent evidence that this negative effect is sourced from the deterioration of the external financing environment. We also find that firms adjust their financing structures by using more trade credit when economic policy uncertainty increases. Our results are robust to sample selection, data frequency, model specification and endogeneity.     

On illiquidity of an emerging sovereign bond market

This study offers an analysis of a sovereign bond market in an emerging country, Turkey, and its illiquidity. We employ the Nelson-Siegel model to generate a term structure for interest rates directly from daily bond price quotes in the Turkish market. We take the noise measure, which is the byproduct of term structure estimation, as a proxy for market-wide illiquidity. Our results show that this noise measure can capture the illiquidity in the Turkish fixed-income market from global financial turbulence as well as local dynamics. Inflation uncertainty and sentiment are the major macro drivers of liquidity crunches. It has also become clear that liquidity in an emerging market such as Turkey in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis has been driven by global forces, however, since 2013 local factors have taken over. This apparent decoupling in liquidity between a major emerging market and global markets followed the approaching end of quantitative easing and a rise in economic turbulence in the country since then.     

企业数字化、业绩波动性与投资效率

本文基于2014～2019年沪深两市上市公司数据,探究企业数字化如何影响投资效率.研究发现,企业数字化提升了投资效率,尤其抑制了过度投资.机制检验发现,业绩波动性在数字化与企业投资效率间起部分中介作用.进一步通过异质性检验发现,相比于国有企业、新兴产业以及经济政策不确定性较小的样本,在非国有企业、非新兴产业以及经济政策...     

The risk spillover between China’s economic policy uncertainty and commodity markets: Evidence from frequency spillover and quantile connectedness approaches

Based on the frequency spillover method extended by Baruník and Křehlík (2018), we explore the risk spillover relationship between China’s economic policy uncertainty (CNEPU) and commodity futures in different frequency domains with daily settlement price data of 14 commodity futures in China. The results show that the risk spillover relationship between CNEPU and the commodity market mainly occurs in the short term. Quantile connectedness results show that economic policy uncertainty, which mainly plays the role of risk transmitter, is more closely related to the commodity market during the market boom and recession. Soybeans, soybean meal, and corn have shown high investment value in the process of market recovery, which is exposed to less risk spillover from policy uncertainty. Finally, the economic crisis with different characteristics will have specific impacts on asymmetric risk spillovers based on certain impact mechanisms.     

Linking forward and reverse supply chain investments: The role of business uncertainty

This paper explores managerial efforts in reverse supply chains (RSC), where the focus is on the capture and exploitation of used products and materials. The RSC can potentially reduce negative environmental impacts of extracting virgin raw materials and waste disposal. If so, investment in the reverse supply chain should not be made in isolation, but instead must be integrated with investments selected to improve the forward supply chain. After defining and operationalizing these constructs, a survey of plant managers was used to empirically assess the linkages between supply chain investments, organizational risk propensity (i.e., willingness to take risk) and business uncertainty. Reverse supply chain investment had two primary dimensions: reconditioning (i.e., high-value recovery) and recycling and waste management (i.e., low- or no-value recovery). Ongoing investment in the forward supply chain was significantly related to investment in recycling and waste management, but not to investment in reconditioning. Moreover, risk propensity was found to mediate the relationship between the external business uncertainty and investment in the forward and reverse supply chain.     

不确定环境下企业财务管理的柔性管理分析

企业一直处于不断变化的客观环境中,而这种变化是带来的不确定性普遍存在于财务管理的筹资、投资、运营和分配过程中。在我国,财务管理的研究一直走在环境变化之后,不能事先预测这种变化,先于环境发生变化之前作出反应和应对策略。本文就企业如何加强与当前的不确定性环境结合进行了简单的分析。     

A model for irreversible investment with construction and revenue uncertainty

This paper presents a model of investment in projects that are characterized by uncertainty over both the construction costs and revenues. Both processes are modeled as spectrally negative Lévy jump-diffusions. The optimal stopping problem that determines the value of the project is solved under fairly general assumptions. It is found that the current value of the benefit-to-cost ratio (BCR) decreases in the frequency of negative shocks to the construction process. This implies that the cost overruns that can be expected if one ignores such shocks are increasing in their frequency. Based on calibrated data, the model is applied to the proposed construction of high-speed rail in the UK and it is found that its economic case cannot currently be made and is unlikely to be met at any time in the next decade. In addition it is found that ignoring construction uncertainty leads to a substantial probability of an erroneous decision being taken.     

Corporates' strategic responses to economic policy uncertainty in China

Using a novel news‐based index of economic policy uncertainty, this paper studies the impact of economic policy uncertainty on corporate strategic positioning and corporate risk in China from 2009 to 2015. The study also investigates the impact of corporate strategic positioning on corporate risk. The results show that corporate strategic positioning and economic policy uncertainty have a significant positive impact on corporate risk. The results also explain that economic policy uncertainty increases the market risk of the firms irrespective of their corporate strategy. However, it increases the business risk of prospector firms and decreases the business risk of defensive firms. The study may help the firms to formulate and improve their strategic positioning while considering economic policy uncertainty. Our results are robust to alternate proxies of economic policy uncertainty and corporate risk.     

The impact of lead time on capital investments

We study equilibrium investment strategies of firms competing in stochastic dynamic market settings and facing two types of investment structures: investment with significant lead time (or time-to-build) and investment without (or minor) lead time. We investigate how investment behavior changes when investment is subject to time-to-build versus when it is not. We characterize equilibrium investment strategies under several information structures and compare results to the social optimum. We offer some new results. The model predicts that, controlling for demand, and production and investment costs, investments and outputs can be higher in progressive industries (which often exhibit time-to-build) than in fast-paced industries (where time-to-build is insignificant). Furthermore, for both investment types (investment with or without time-to-build) we offer a novel equilibrium in which firms incrementally invest. This behavior is driven by demand uncertainty and capacity constraints. Also, expected outputs are lower than Cournot outputs as firms face uncertainty. Moreover, the amount of uncertainty has different effects over investment types.     

Oil price uncertainty and movements in the US government bond risk premia

In this paper, we analyze the predictability of the movements of bond premia of US Treasury due to oil price uncertainty over the monthly period 1953:06 to 2016:12. For our purpose, we use a higher order nonparametric causality-in-quantiles framework, which in turn, allows us to test for predictability over the entire conditional distribution of not only bond returns, but also its volatility, by controlling for misspecification due to uncaptured nonlinearity and structural breaks, which we show to exist in our data. We find that oil uncertainty not only predicts (increases) US bond returns, but also its volatility, with the effect on the latter being stronger. In addition, oil uncertainty tends to have a stronger impact on the shortest and longest maturities (2- and 5-year), and relatively weaker impact on bonds with medium-term (3- and 4-year) maturities. Our results are robust to alternative measures of oil market uncertainty and bond market volatility.     

The COVID-19 pandemic uncertainty,investor sentiment,and global equity markets: Evidence from the time-frequency co-movements

We use daily data of the Google search engine volume index (GSVI) to capture the pandemic uncertainty and examine its effect on stock market activity (return, volatility, and illiquidity) of major world economies while controlling the effect of the Financial and Economic Attitudes Revealed by Search (FEARS) sentiment index. We use a time–frequency based wavelet approach comprising wavelet coherence and phase difference for our empirical assessment. During the early spread of the COVID-19, our results suggest that pandemic uncertainty, and FEARS sentiment strongly co-move, and increased pandemic uncertainty leads to pessimistic investor sentiment. Furthermore, our partial wavelet analysis results indicate a synchronization relationship between pandemic uncertainty and stock market activities across G7 countries and the world market. Our results are robust to the inclusion of alternative pandemic fear measure in the form of equity market volatility infectious disease tracker. The pandemic uncertainty and associated sentiment implications could be one plausible reason for increased volatility and illiquidity in the market, and hence, policymakers should look upon this issue for the financial market stability perspective.     

Economic uncertainty and growth performance: a macroeconomic modeling analysis for Pakistan

This paper investigates the effects of economic uncertainty on growth performance of Pakistan through developing a small macroeconomic model. The GARCH method has been used for construction of economic uncertainty variables related to macroeconomic policies. The structural outcomes clearly indicate that economic policy uncertainty affects negatively on real and nominal sectors of Pakistan. The forecasting of model and different policy uncertainty simulation shocks also indicated that an adjustment in economic policies due to change of policy objectives create uncertain environment in country, which not only deteriorates the investment climate of country, it also affects the economic growth. Our study concludes that economic uncertainty not only reduces the current investment and economic growth, it also affects the future decision of investment and economic growth. This study suggests that sustainable and steady economic policies always reduce economic uncertainty and promote the confidence of economic agents, which help in achieving the targets of investment, trade and economic growth. Our study also maintains the predictability and reliability of government policies for the accomplishment of macroeconomic goals and economic development of country.     

A taxonomy of expatriate leaders' cross-cultural uncertainty: insights into the leader–employee dyad

The authors develop a theory-based taxonomy of expatriate leaders' cross-cultural uncertainty toward local employees by drawing on uncertainty reduction theory. Two studies with expatriate leaders provide the empirical basis. The first, qualitative study uses in-depth interviews with 23 expatriate leaders to identify major facets and constructs for describing expatriate leaders in different uncertainty constellations. A quantitative survey-based study with dyadic data about 149 expatriate leaders and their local employees identifies five different expatriate types with regard to their cross-cultural uncertainty. The results reveal performance differences across the five expatriate types.     

Uncertain dynamics,correlation effects,and robust investment decisions

We analyze a firm׳s investment problem when the dynamics of project value and investment cost are uncertain. We provide an explicit solution using a robust method for an ambiguity averse firm taking this into account. Ambiguity aversion regarding a common risk factor impacts differently than ambiguity aversion regarding investment cost residual risk. Correlation between project value and investment cost matters; ambiguity aversion regarding common risk can decrease the investment probability only if correlation is positive. Ambiguity aversion regarding residual risk always increases the investment probability. When only project value is risky, volatility can monotonically decrease the investment threshold; this does not hold with the multiple prior method.     

Monetary policy,financial uncertainty,and secular stagnation

A monetary policy framework describing how to cope with a financial crisis might alleviate a recession; however, it might also result in subsequent secular stagnation. Based on an empirical New Keynesian model with financial uncertainty, this study investigates how monetary policy can avoid sluggish economic recovery in response to financial shocks. The results show that a protracted sluggish response of an output gap to a financial shock is triggered by inflation targeting, without considering interest rate variations. In such a policy, the uncertainty causes additional sluggish behavior after a sharp reduction in the output gap. In contrast, in a speed limit policy, the output gap recovers rapidly, regardless of the central bank’s approach to interest rate variations, and the uncertainty mitigates reductions in the output gap. Finally, the results are robust under several alternative settings.