New Activities, the Welfare Cost of Uncertainty and Investment Policies

Joshua Aizenman

International Journal of Finance & Economics, 1998, vol. 3, issue 2, 97-110

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of policy uncertainty on the formation of new activities in Romer's (1994) type of economy, where productivity of labor increases with the number of capital goods. Adding a new capital good requires a capital specific set-up cost, invested prior to using the capital good. Agents are disappointment averse, putting greater utility weight on downside risk (as modeled by Gul, 1991). Policy uncertainty is induced by "revenue seeking" administrations, which tend to tax the "quasi fixed" capital, ignoring long term costs. Disappointment aversion implies that investment, labor and capitalists income drop at a rate proportional to the standard deviation of the tax rate. Hence, policy uncertainty induces first-order adverse effects, whereas policy uncertainty leads to second-order effects when consumers maximize the conventional expected utility. The adverse effects of policy uncertainty can be partially overcome by a proper investment policy. The paper interprets the tax concessions granted to multinationals as a commitment device that helps overcoming the adverse implications of policy uncertainty. Copyright @ 1998 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. All rights reserved.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jtoc?ID=15416 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: New Activities, the Welfare Cost of Uncertainty and Investment Policies (1996)
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:ijf:ijfiec:v:3:y:1998:i:2:p:97-110

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://jws-edcv.wile ... PRINT_ISSN=1076-9307

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Finance & Economics is currently edited by Mark P. Taylor, Keith Cuthbertson and Michael P. Dooley

More articles in International Journal of Finance & Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley-Blackwell Digital Licensing () and Christopher F. Baum ().