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Using a news-based index of policy uncertainty, we document a strong negative relationship between firm-level capital investment and the aggregate level of uncertainty associated with future policy and regulatory outcomes. More importantly, we find evidence that the relation between policy uncertainty and capital investment is not uniform in the cross-section, being significantly stronger for firms with a higher degree of investment irreversibility and for firms that are more dependent on government spending. Our results lend empirical support to the notion that policy uncertainty can depress corporate investment by inducing precautionary delays due to investment irreversibility.

In 2009 and 2010, China undertook a fiscal stimulus program worth 4 trillion yuan, roughly equivalent to 11 percent of its annual GDP. This program was largely financed by off-balance-sheet companies—known as local financing vehicles—that both borrowed and spent on behalf of local governments. These companies have continued to grow since the stimulus program concluded at the end of 2010; their spending has accounted for roughly 10 percent of GDP each year, with an increasing share used for what are essentially commercial projects. And their spending has likely been responsible for an increase of 5 percentage points in the aggregate investment rate and for part of the decline of 7 to 8 percentage points in the current account surplus since 2008. We argue that local governments have used their new access to financial resources to facilitate favored businesses’ access to capital, which potentially worsens the overall efficiency of capital allocation. The long-run effect of off-balance- sheet spending by local governments may be a permanent decline in the growth rate of aggregate productivity and GDP.

Parental spending on children is often presumed to be one of the main ways that parents invest in children and a main reason why children from wealthier households are advantaged. Yet, although research has tracked changes in the other main form of parental investment—namely, time—there is little research on spending. We use data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to examine how spending changed from the early 1970s to the late 2000s, focusing particularly on inequality in parental investment in children. Parental spending increased, as did inequality of investment. We also investigate shifts in the composition of spending and linkages to children's characteristics. Investment in male and female children changed substantially: households with only female children spent significantly less than parents in households with only male children in the early 1970s; but by the 1990s, spending had equalized; and by the late 2000s, girls appeared to enjoy an advantage. Finally, the shape of parental investment over the course of children's lives changed. Prior to the 1990s, parents spent most on children in their teen years. After the 1990s, however, spending was greatest when children were under the age of 6 and in their mid-20s.

This paper provides evidence that managers adjust firm advertising, in part, to attract investor attention and influence short-term stock returns. First, I show that increased advertising spending is associated with a contemporaneous rise in retail buying and abnormal stock returns, and is followed by lower future returns. Second, I document a significant increase in advertising spending prior to insider sales and a significant decrease in the subsequent year. Additional analyses suggest that the inverted V-shaped pattern in advertising spending around insider sales is most consistent with managers' opportunistically adjusting firm advertising to exploit the temporary return effect to their own benefit.

Inadequate funding levels are a major impediment to effective global biodiversity conservation and are likely associated with recent failures to meet United Nations biodiversity targets. Some countries are more severely underfunded than others and therefore represent urgent financial priorities. However, attempts to identify these highly underfunded countries have been hampered for decades by poor and incomplete data on actual spending, coupled with uncertainty and lack of consensus over the relative size of spending gaps. Here, we assemble a global database of annual conservation spending. We then develop a statistical model that explains 86% of variation in conservation expenditures, and use this to identify countries where funding is robustly below expected levels. The 40 most severely underfunded countries contain 32% of all threatened mammalian diversity and include neighbors in some of the world’s most biodiversity-rich areas (Sundaland, Wallacea, and Near Oceania). However, very modest increases in international assistance would achieve a large improvement in the relative adequacy of global conservation finance. Our results could therefore be quickly applied to limit immediate biodiversity losses at relatively little cost.

A key issue in current research and policy is the size of fiscal multipliers when the economy is in recession. We provide three insights. First, using regime-switching models, we find large differences in the size of spending multipliers in recessions and expansions with fiscal policy being considerably more effective in recessions than in expansions. Second, we estimate multipliers for more disaggregate spending variables which behave differently relative to aggregate fiscal policy shocks, with military spending having the largest multiplier. Third, we show that controlling for predictable components of fiscal shocks tends to increase the size of the multipliers in recessions.

This article contributes to the debate on fiscal multipliers, in the context of an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, featuring a rich fiscal policy block and a transmission mechanism for government spending shocks. I find the multiplier for government spending to be 1.07, which is largest on impact. The multipliers for labor and capital tax on impact are 0.13 and 0.34, respectively. The effects of tax cuts take time to build and exceed stimulative effects of spending by 12–20 quarters. I carry out counterfactual exercises to show how alternative financing methods and expected monetary policy have consequences for the size of fiscal multipliers.

it is hardly news that we are in the midst of rapid economic change. The advances in information and communications technology (ICT), in the life and other sciences, and their profusion of innovative products, from the newest electronic devices to the latest drugs and treatments, are ample evidence. Equally pervasive are new business models in services (big box retail, online banking, on-demand media) and the explosion in social networking and new bus ushered in by the Internet (telework, virtual meetings, job boards). Given the magnitude of the changes brought on by these innovations, it is useful to step back and ask: What does economic analysis have to say about the sources and mechanisms of these shifts and revolutions, and what economic metrics are available to measure their overall size and impact? The received theory of economic growth is the natural candidate for this job. The common feature of the received theory is a reliance on the production function as the organizing framework of the analysis. But companies are moving away from making things in the United States and focusing increasingly on services, product development, design, and marketing. A new strand of empirical growth literature has emerged, aimed at addressing this problem by updating the way that business activity is depicted in macroeconomic data and analysis. The following pages of this paper review some of the key ideas about intangibles in the existing literature and present new sources-of-growth estimates for the US nonfarm business sector. The extended time perspective shows that the recent technological revolution, in its various manifestations, is associated with a dramatic shift in the composition of investment spending and in the factors driving the growth of output per worker hour. This is the main result of this paper.

This article examines the determinants of financial covenant thresholds in bank loan agreements and information conveyed through the selection of tight financial covenants. We find that riskier firms and firms with fewer investment opportunities select tighter financial covenants. We also find that selection of tight covenants is associated with improvements in the covenant variable and declines in investment spending and net debt issuance. We observe these changes also for borrowers that do not breach their covenants, suggesting that they are not simply the result of creditor influence conditional on a technical default. Furthermore, we find that violations of tightly set covenants have significantly less of an impact on the borrower's investment spending and net debt issuance than violations of loosely set covenants. Overall, our results suggest that the selection of tight covenants conveys information concerning future changes in covenant variables, investment and financial policies, and the outcome of covenant violations.

This article proposes a novel approach to empirically identifying government spending multipliers that relies on two features unique to many low-income countries: (1) borrowing from the World Bank finances a substantial fraction of government spending, and (2) spending on World Bank—financed projects is typically spread out over several years following the original approval of the project. The first fact means that fluctuations in spending on World Bank—financed projects are a significant source of fluctuations in overall government spending in these countries. The second fact means that fluctuations in World Bank—financed spending in a given year are largely determined by fluctuations in project approval decisions made in previous years, and so are unlikely to be correlated with shocks to output in the current year. I use World Bank project-level disbursement data to isolate the component of World Bank—financed government spending in a given year that is associated with past project approval decisions. I use this as an instrument for total government spending to estimate multipliers in a sample of 29 primarily low-income countries where variation in government spending from this source is large relative to the size of the economy. The resulting spending multipliers are small and reasonably precisely estimated to be in the vicinity of 0.5.