During the last decade, the econometric study of investment behaviour
has developed from the descriptive construction of empirical investment
equations, as first performed by J. Tinbergen in his well-known 19-
publication: 'A Method and its Application to Investment Activity', to
the empirical testing of increasingly explicit theories of production
behaviour. It was principally D. Jorgenson who gave a great push to this
intensified interest in micro-economic investment, with his famous
1965-paper: 'Anticipation and Investment Behaviour', in which he
formulated a pure neoclassical model of investment behaviour under the
conditions of a (simple) homogeneous production technology and perfectly
competi- tive markets. But, although the scope of the familiar flexible
accelerator model was considerably extended by the introduction of
relative factor prices, the resulting investment relationship generally
remained one of the most ill-estimated equations in econometric models.
The very rigid assumptions of pure neoclassical models might have caused
these bad results. More- over, the required ex post measure for
aggregate capital stock is very deficient for most economies. Hence, it
should be interesting to formulate investment models subject to less
rigid restrictions on production and market behaviour and, preferably,
not containing any measure of aggre- gate capital stock.