When the CAPM, Fama and French (1993) or
Carhart (1997) models are used to infer the cost of equity, it has a positive eect on
investment. When factor-augmented vector autoregressive (favar) approach is used to
allow for a much wider range of determinants, the anomalous result persists. However,
when an implied cost of equity capital approach is used, the theoretically predicted
negative sign is observed.