Investment and Exit Decisions at the Plant Level

This study was written while I was a doctoral student in the Graduier- tenkolleg Finanz-und Gutermiirkte at the University of Mannheim; it has been accepted as a doctoral dissertation in February 1997. I am indebted to my advisors, Professors Axel Borsch-Supan and Martin Hellwig at Mannheim and John Rust at Madison, for their encouragement and for many helpful discussions and comments. At various stages, I benefited from comments on portions of the manu- script by, and from discussions with, Thomas Astebro, Charles Calomiris, Timothy Dunne, Frank Gerhard, Annette Kohler, Jens Koke, Stephan Monissen, Gordon Phillips, Winfried Pohlmeier, Kenneth Troske, Wol- fram Wissler and seminar participants at Columbia Business School, the University of Mannheim, the University of Tiibingen, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Yale University, the ENTER Jamborees at Uni- versity College London, January 1995, and at Tilburg University, January 1997, at a Meeting of the DFG-Schwerpunktprogramm Industrieokonomik und Inputmiirkte, Heidelberg, November 1996, and at the annual meeting of the Verein fur Socialpolitik, Bern, September 1997.Silke Januszewski and Melanie Liihrmann provided dedicated assistence during the prepa- ration of the final version of the manuscript.