An agent based approach to analysis of Capital structure and industry dynamics: The role of policy

Roberto Gabriele () and Enrico ZANINOTTO

No 296, Computing in Economics and Finance 2004 from Society for Computational Economics

Abstract: The paper analyses the role of capital structure of firm on industry dynamics. Empirical evidence shows that policy interventions can alter for some the frims�cost of the capital. As a result firms on average are overcapitalized with a low capital productivity. Moreover, the market in which capital is cheap seems to be able to reduce consistently the entry and the exit of firms: the competitive process is obscured and selection is sterilized. We argue that the distortions induced by an anomalous endowment of capital input can have two effects in the market: (a) A raise in firms� heterogeneity; (b) a distortion of the process of acquisition of technical progress. We used an agent based model to explore the issue. Firms in the model are heterogeneous bounded rational and endowed with a two inputs fixed coefficients technology. Technical progress is embodied in the new capital stock and modifies the combination of the two inputs. The cost of the capital input is one of the relevant parameter of the model. Each capital stock can have short (SL) or long life (LL). The policy interventions finance the LL investments so that its price will be on average lower than for SL. Firms have to choose in each period between two strategies: A cost reducing one�in the present choosing to invest in LL-, or a productivity augmenting one�as a stochastic outcome of the investment in SL. The model is programmed using SWARM platform and it is explored through Montecarlo simulations.

Keywords: Agent based models; capital structure; Industry dynamics; Leontief production function (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C63 D92 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-08-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sce:scecf4:296

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Computing in Economics and Finance 2004 from Society for Computational Economics
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().