Summary: | The explanation of aggregate and sectoral
investment behavior has been one of the less successful endeavors in empirical economics.
Existing econometric models have had little success in explaining or predicting investment
spending. This may be because most such models fail to account for the irreversibility of
most investment spending. With irreversibility, changes in the riskiness of future cash
flows or interest rates should in theory dramatically affect the decision to invest - more
so than, say, a change in the levels of interest rates. Here I survey some of the empirical
support for this proposition, and discuss the implications for investment modelling.Nuclear
power plants are a controversial technology. The future of the industry depends on the
ability to manage efficiently and safely, and to effectively manage organizational change as
new technologies and practices are introduced and disseminated. This paper provides a
conceptual framework and discussion of the management and organization of nuclear power
plants around three questions: (1) How should nuclear power plants be organized and managed
to ensure that they are operated most safely and efficiently? (2) What does an understanding
of the organization and management of nuclear power plants tell us about how they change or
resist change? and (3) What indicators or measures of various characteristics and processes
of nuclear power plants are needed in order to address the above questions? We review
existing literature on the organization and management of nuclear power plants, and suggest
how we would structure a research project to address the above questions.
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