Investment reluctance: irreversibility or imperfect capital markets?

Low investment rates are a puzzling phenomenon particularly in transition economies with an urgent need for modernisation. The literature offers two alternative explanations: imperfect capital markets and investment reluctance due to real options effects. In this paper, we develop a generalised model that combines both aspects. The econometric implementation has the structure of a generalised Tobit model. Applying this model to German farm-level panel data, we show that ignoring real option effects may lead to erroneous conclusions in the context of empirical investment equations.