Essays on investment and saving[Essais sur l’investissement et l’épargne]

My thesis culminates into a research program that studies investment (and saving) from three different perspectives. It informs on 1) the saving behaviour of oil-rich countries, on 2) price formation and investment dynamics in the oil market, and on 3) the role of share buybacks in muting the positive effect of accommodative monetary policy on firm-level investment. The underlying common thread among these three work streams is understanding factors that mediate the investment decisions at the firm, industry, or country level. The first chapter of my thesis, External Saving and Exhaustible Resource Extraction, addresses precisely the issue of exhaustible resource management in the face of uncertainty. In linking the extraction and saving behavior under a coherent theoretical framework, this chapter contributes to two veins of the literature that have developed separately until more recently. The second chapter, The Delaying Effect of Storage on Investment: Evidence from the US Oil Sector, continues to explore the role of uncertainty but this time analyses both price and investment dynamics when investment decisions are irreversible. The last chapter of this thesis, Share Buybacks, Monetary Policy and the Cost of Debt, turns it attention to an empirical investigation of the determinants of investment. Starting from the capital structure of firms, this part of my thesis focuses on the role of repurchases in diverting low-cost debt away from investment and employment.