Entrepreneurial ignition of the business cycle: The corporate finance of malinvestment

Abstract

This paper provides an extension of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) framework by integrating corporate capital structure, the monetary policy transmission channel, and capital budgeting analyses. In this manner, the paper presents the business cycle as being exogenously set up by central bank authorities, but endogenously set off by commercial banks and enterprises making use of central bank-distorted market signals. The cyclical boom is modeled as a gradual process where both latitudinal and longitudinal investment expansions are possible with either internal or external finance. Bank credit creation, although a necessary condition for igniting the boom, is diversely transmitted to the economy because of heterogeneity in entrepreneurial misjudgment, corporate capital structure strategies, and the class of projects available to the enterprises.