Paper Title
Determinants of Investment: International Evidence

Abstract
Investment plays an important role for economic growth and this is recognized in both theoretical and empirical literature. Therefore, it is of crucial importance to identify the determinants of investment. While empirical studies focusing on individual countries are often conducted, those encompassing broader, international samples seem to be less present in the literature. We contribute to the empirical literature by investigating the determinants of investment in a broad sample of more than one hundred economies and using relatively long data series starting in 1960s. We use the investment function which is conventionally employed in the literature, but also test for the importance of the variable economic disasters that has recently become very popular in economic literature. In addition, we also introduce a number of control variables to have our estimations and findings as robust as possible. In our empirical investigation we first apply the cross section econometric approach, and then investigate the determinants of investment through a panel data analysis. Our findings seem to support the usual determinants of investment, but also suggest the importance of economic disasters. Keywords - Determinants of investment, Economic disasters, Panel data