TY - JOUR AU - Mairesse,Jacques AU - Hall,Bronwyn H. AU - Mulkay,Benoit TI - Firm-Level Investment in France and the United States: An Exploration of What We Have Learned in Twenty Years JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 7437 PY - 1999 Y2 - December 1999 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7437 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7437.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Jacques Mairesse CREST-INSEE 15, Boulevard Gabriel PERI 92245 MALAKOFF CEDEX FRANCE Tel: 33-1-41-17-35-50 Fax: 33-1-41-17-76-34 E-Mail: mairesse@ensae.fr Bronwyn H. Hall Dept. of Economics 549 Evans Hall UC Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 Tel: 510/642-3878 Fax: 510/548-5561 E-Mail: bhhall@nber.org BENOIT MULKAY LEREPS,Université Toulouse 1 2 rue du Doyen Gabriel Marty 31042 Toulouse cedex 9 FRANCE E-Mail: benoit.mulkay@univ-montp1.fr AB - Our two related goals in this paper are the following: Firstly and mainly, we want to examine the effects of major changes in modelling strategy and econometric methodology, over the past twenty years, on estimation of firm-level investment equations using panel data. Secondly, we try to assess whether the differences in the estimated investment equations, as between recent years and ten to twenty years go in the French and U.S. Manufacturing industries, are real' and economically meaningful. Thus our paper consists of a series of comparisons: a simple accelerator-profit specification versus one with error correction, traditional between- and within-firm estimation versus GMM estimation, the investment behavior of French firms versus that of U.S. firms, and investment behavior in recent years versus ten to twenty years ago. Although the important econometric advances of the past twenty years have been far from being as successful as we had hoped for, we do find some significant improvement in the specification, estimation and interpretation of firm investment equations; we also fin some real changes in the investment behavior of French and U.S. firms during these twenty years. ER -