宏观Workshop:On the Heterogeneous Interest Rate Sensitivity of Firms’ Investments

发布日期:2021-01-14 12:00    来源:

Title: On the Heterogeneous Interest Rate Sensitivity of Firms’ Investments

Speaker:Donghai Zhang (张冬海)

Abstract:Small/Young firms’ investment rates are more volatile (Fact 1) and more sensitive to monetary policy shocks (Fact 2). The existing literature interprets these as evidence supporting the financial accelerator mechanism based on the narrative that small/young firms are more financially constrained. This paper argues that size and age not only proxy for external financing needs but also for the importance of adjustment cost frictions. We consider firm life cycle dynamics in a heterogeneous firms model with nominal rigidity and adjustment costs. We show that both Fact 1 and Fact 2 are consistent with a model featuring adjustment costs, and therefore, the source of the underlying heterogeneity is ambiguous. We label this as a confounding problem. Understanding the source of heterogeneous firms’ investments is crucial for designing a policy that aims to stimulate investments. We propose an empirical strategy to assess the relative importance of the two mechanisms in the data relying on investment-specific technology (IST) shocks. Our model predicts that small/young firms are more sensitive to IST shocks, whereas the classical financial accelerator mechanism indicates the opposite. Our empirical estimation suggests that the adjustment costs mechanism plays a dominant role.

About the speaker:Donghai Zhang is an assistant professor at the Institute for Macroeconomics and Econometrics of the University of Bonn. He obtained his PhD in economics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2018. His research focuses on macroeconomics, monetary policy, time series econometrics and financial economics.

主题:workshop
时间:2021年1月14日 14:30 北京,上海

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