Technology Adoption, Vintage Capital and Asset Prices

Xiaoji Lin

FMG Discussion Papers from Financial Markets Group

Abstract: We study technology adoption, risk and expected returns using a dynamic equilibrium model with production. The central insight is that optimal technology adoption is an important driving force of the cross section of stock returns. The model predicts that technology adopting firms are less risky than non-adopting firms. Intuitively, by preventing firms from freely upgrading existing capital to the technology frontier, costly technology adoption reduces the flexibility of firms in smoothing dividends, and hence generates the risk dispersion between technology adopting firms and non-adopting firms. The model explains qualitatively and in many cases quantitatively empirical regularities: (i) The positive relation between firm age and stock returns; (ii) firms with high investment on average are younger and earn lower returns than firms with low investment; and (iii) growth firms on average are younger than value firms, and the value premium is increasing in firm age.

Date: 2010-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-ino and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lse.ac.uk/fmg/workingPapers/discussionPapers/fmgdps/dp645.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fmg:fmgdps:dp645

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FMG Discussion Papers from Financial Markets Group
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The FMG Administration ().