Search Results
Journal Article
Interest rates and the timing of new production
This article studies the relation between IPO investment and the rate of interest. The 1950s and early 1960s, especially, were periods of very low real interest rates, and IPO investment was very low, with firms delaying their IPOs significantly. The authors find a qualitative difference between investment of IPO-ing firms and the investment of incumbent firms. The latter is decreasing in the interest rate, as neoclassical theory predicts. On the other hand, very low interest rates tend to discourage IPOs, and this may be why the 1950s and 1960s contained few IPOs.
Conference Paper
Vintage organization capital
We argue that a firm's organization capital depends on the state of technology when the firm was born and on the technologies that have followed. We estimate vintage effects on the value of firms from 114 years of stock market data. We find: 1) a surprisingly strong upward trend in the stock-market share of the largest firms, 2) a very large quantity of organization capital created by the 1920's vintage, 3) strong indications that the 1970's and 1980's vintages will be followed by more complementary technologies, and 4) major technological change since WW2 in the process by which organization ...
Journal Article
Liquidity effects in the bond market
The authors find that supply risk in the market for Treasury bills adds between 10 basis points and 40 basis points to the standard deviation of the T-bill interest rate. The risk will probably increase unless the Fed expands the set of assets that it uses to conduct open market operations.