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Cash Flow Sensitivity of Cash: A Cross Country Analysis
Abstract
Using a large panel of 5086 firms from 7 European countries, namely Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherland, Sweden and UK over the period of 1981 to 2010, we made attempt to see the effect of financial constraints on international corporate policies based on their liquidity demand. Controlling for firm size, investment opportunities and alternative sources and competing uses of funds, a firm’s decision to change its cash holdings is found to be positively and significantly related with internal cash flows. Our results further reveal that constrained firms like to save relatively more cash out of their cash inflows, whereas the unconstrained firms do not maintain any such significant cash hoarding behavior. The observed relationships prevail for the whole sample, within each countries and remain consistent across different estimation procedures and alternative financial constraint criteria. Our results thus point to the fact that average firms in our sample face constrained access to external finance due to financially imperfect and incomplete markets.
... In brief, the CCFS should be insignificant for unconstrained firms. Our results are similar to (Azmat & Iqbal, 2017;Baptista e Silva, 2012;Erdogan, 2018;Koo & Maeng, 2018;Lin, 2007;Quader & Abdullah, 2016). Moreover, unconstrained firms have a higher coefficient than constrained firms as founded by (Erdogan, 2018;Pál & Ferrando, 2010). ...
This study analyzes cash-cash flow sensitivity by comparing financially constrained and unconstrained firms in eight markets. 486 manufacturing firms are examined between 2005 and 2018 using the Generalized Method of Moments. These firms are categorized based on size, age, and Size-Age, Sales-Age, and Kaplan and Zingales indices. We find that both constrained and unconstrained firms evince positive cash-cash flow sensitivity. Although unconstrained firms obtain external financing easily, they prefer to first use internally generated funds in accordance with the pecking order theory. The results also reveal that cash-cash flow sensitivity cannot be used to test financial constraints in emerging markets.
Technology-based small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the driving force behind China's economic and technological development. However, these enterprises often face challenges in financing their research and development (R&D) activities due to limited financing opportunities. Previous research has primarily focused on the resource attributes of government innovation subsidies, which serve as a crucial funding source for these SMEs. This paper aims to explore the impact of government innovation subsidies on firms from a novel perspective, considering the signaling characteristics of these subsidies. The theoretical foundation of this study lies in the asymmetric information theory and the signaling mechanism through which government subsidies send signals about enterprises. The study uses enterprise data from 2012 to 2019 to investigate the effect of government subsidies on the R&D investment of enterprises listed on the SMEs Board in Chinese stock market. The results reveal a significantly positive effect of government subsidies on the R&D investment of SME Board-listed enterprises and verify the mediating role of financing constraints in this effect. The extent to which government subsidies influence the R&D investment of SME Board-listed enterprises is associated with the enterprises' ownership characteristics, debt ratios, and times interest earned ratios. This study contributes to the literature on the SMEs Board market and may provide the Chinese government insights into developing industry policies that maximize the effectiveness of government subsidies.
Given the increasing focus on global sustainable development, many enterprises in developing countries such as China participate in green governance and scale up their green investment; however, many enterprises still experience financing difficulties. Our study investigates whether green governance can mitigate corporate financing constraints. Using a sample of Chinese, A-share listed, high-pollution enterprises from 2013 to 2018, we find that corporate green governance practices, including environmental performance and information disclosure, ease corporate financing constraints. This effect is pronounced in areas with high levels of financial development and for state-owned enterprises. This paper not only proposes a channel for alleviating enterprises’ financing constraints but also reveals the importance of industrial transformation and emissions reduction for energy-intensive industries in emerging markets.
We find that the cash flow sensitivity of cash holdings of firms whose investment opportunities are lower is significantly higher by examining a panel data of 898 Korean firms for 1999–2014. The cash flow sensitivity of investment is also found to be lower in case of low investment opportunity. Both findings suggest that firms decide to hold cash in response to an increase in cash flow when they do not have a good investment opportunity. Precautionary motive because of financial constraints and uncertainty, and agency problems, however, are not associated with the cash flow sensitivity of cash holdings. These findings imply that it is necessary to develop new investment opportunities to encourage firms to spend more cash in Korea.
Lax financial conditions can foster credit booms. The global credit boom of the last decade led to large capital flows across the world, including large movements of resources from the Northern countries of the euro area towards the Southern part. Since the start of the crisis and more markedly after 2009, these flows have suddenly stopped, creating severe adjustment pressures. This paper argues that, at this point, the common monetary policy can only try to mitigate the unavoidable adjustment by maintaining overall financial stability. The challenge is to strike a delicate balance between providing liquidity for solvent institutions while keeping the overall pressure on for a rapid correction of the imbalances.
This paper examines how the investment of financially constrained firms varies with their level of internal funds. We develop a theoretical model of optimal investment under financial constraints. Our model endogenizes the costs of external funds and allows for negative levels of internal funds. We show that the resulting relationship between internal funds and investment is U-shaped. In particular, when a firm's internal funds are negative and sufficiently low, a further decrease leads to an increase in investment. This effect is driven by the investor's participation constraint: when part of any loan must be used to close a financing gap, the investor will provide funds only if the firm invests at a scale large enough to generate the revenue that enables the firm to repay. We test our theory using a data set with close to 100,000 firm-year observations. The data strongly support our predictions. Among other results, we find a negative relationship between measures of internal funds and investment for a substantial share of financially constrained firms. Our results also help to explain some contrasting findings in the empirical investment literature.
This article presents new tests for finance constraints on investment by emphasizing the often-neglected role of working capital as both a use and a source of funds. The coefficient of endogenous working capital investment is negative in a fixed-investment regression, as expected if working capital competes with fixed investment for a limited pool of finance. This finding addresses a criticism of previous research on finance constraints, that cash flows may simply proxy shifts in investment demand. In addition, previous studies may have underestimated the impact of finance constraints on growth and investment because firms smooth fixed investment in the short run with working capital.
We develop an endogenous growth model with R&D spillovers to study the long-run consequences of offshoring with firm heterogeneity and incomplete contracts. In so doing, we model offshoring as the geographical fragmentation of a firm's production chain between a home upstream division and a foreign downstream division. While there is always a positive correlation between upstream bargaining weight and offshoring activities, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between these and growth. Whether offshoring with incomplete contracts also increases consumption depends on firm heterogeneity. As for welfare, whereas with complete contracts an R&D subsidy is enough to solve the inefficiency due to R&D spillovers, with incomplete contracts a production subsidy is also needed. Copyright © The editors of the "Scandinavian Journal of Economics" 2009 .
I modify the uniform-price auction rules in allowing the seller to ration bidders. This allows me to provide a strategic foundation for underpricing when the seller has an interest in ownership dispersion. Moreover, many of the so-called "collusive-seeming" equilibria disappear.
We construct company panel datasets for manufacturing firms in Belgium, France, Germany and the UK, covering the period 1978-89. These datasets are used to estimate a range of empirical investment equations, and to investigate the role played by financial factors in each country. A robust finding is that cash flow or profits terms appear to be both statistically and quantitatively more significant in the UK than in the three continental European countries. This is consistent with the suggestion that financial constraints on investment may be relatively severe in the more market-oriented UK financial system.
In efficient and complete financial markets, internal cash flows should have no impact on investment levels; but in inefficient and incomplete markets, the pecking order theory contends that there should be a positive relationship. Further, some studies show that investments of financially constrained firms are more sensitive to internal funds than those of less constrained firms but other studies show the opposite. Using comparable recent data on firms in the four largest industrialized countries (US, UK, Japan, and Germany), this study documents that in all four countries, controlling for the investment opportunity set, investment levels are significantly positively influenced by levels of internal cash flows, indicating that firms face limitation in access to external finance and may operate using a pecking order. Further, international differences in investment level sensitivities to opportunities indicate closer outside monitoring of firms in the bank-centered countries.
According to basic economics, if demand exceeds supply, prices will rise, thus decreasing demand or increasing supply until demand and supply are in equilibrium; thus if prices do their job, rationing will not exist. However, credit rationing does exist. This paper demonstrates that even in equilibrium, credit rationing will exist in a loan market. Credit rationing is defined as occurring either (a) among loan applicants who appear identical, and some do and do not receive loans, even though the rejected applicants would pay higher interest rates; or (b) there are groups who, with a given credit supply, cannot obtain loans at any rate, even though with larger credit supply they would. A model is developed to provide the first theoretical justification for true credit rationing. The amount of the loan and the amount of collateral demanded affect the behavior and distribution of borrowers. Consequently, faced with increased credit demand, it may not be profitable to raise interest rates or collateral; instead banks deny loans to borrowers who are observationally indistinguishable from those receiving loans. It is not argued that credit rationing always occurs, but that it occurs under plausible assumptions about lender and borrower behavior. In the model, interest rates serve as screening devices for evaluating risk. Interest rates change the behavior (serve as incentive mechanism) for the borrower, increasing the relative attractiveness of riskier projects; banks ration credit, rather than increase rates when there is excess demand. Banks are shown not to increase collateral as a means of allocating credit; although collateral may have incentivizing effects, it may have adverse selection effects. Equity, nonlinear payment schedules, and contingency contracts may be introduced and yet there still may be rationing. The law of supply and demand is thus a result generated by specific assumptions and is model specific; credit rationing does exist. (TNM)
We investigate the investment-cash flow sensitivity of a large sample of the UK listed firms and confirm that investment is strongly cash flow-sensitive. Is this sensitivity a result of agency problems when managers with high discretion overinvest, or of asymmetric information when managers owning equity are underinvesting if the market (erroneously) demands too high a risk premium? We find that investment-cash flow sensitivity results mainly from the agency costs of free cash flow. The magnitude of the relationship depends on insider ownership in a non-monotonic way. Furthermore, we obtain that outside blockholders, such as financial institutions, the government, and industrial firms (only at high control levels), reduce the cash flow sensitivity of investment via effective monitoring. Finally, financial institutions appear to play a role in mitigating informational asymmetries between firms and capital markets. We corroborate our findings by performing additional tests based on the stochastic efficient frontier approach and power indices.
No. This paper investigates the relationship between financing constraints and investment-cash flow sensitivities by analyzing the firms identified by Fazzari, Hubbard, and Petersen as having unusually high investment-cash flow sensitivities. We find that firms that appear less financially constrained exhibit significantly greater sensitivities than firms that appear more financially constrained. We find this pattern for the entire sample period, subperiods, and individual years. These results (and simple theoretical arguments) suggest that higher sensitivities cannot be interpreted as evidence that firms are more financially constrained. These findings call into question the interpretation of most previous research that uses this methodology.
Almeida, Campello, and Weisbach (2004) and Riddick and Whited (2009) offer contrasting conclusions regarding the corporate cash flow sensitivity of cash. We use an augmented empirical model to affirm the conclusion in Riddick and Whited that the cash flow sensitivity of cash is generally negative. In addition, we contend that the cash flow sensitivity of cash is asymmetric to cash flow. The asymmetry may be due to several reasons, including binding project contracts, bad news withholding, and agency costs. Using a sample of manufacturing firms from 1972 to 2006, we document that the cash flow sensitivity of cash is negative when a firm faces a positive cash flow environment, supporting Riddick and Whited (2009), but the cash flow sensitivity of cash is positive when a firm faces negative cash flows. We further divide firms into financially constrained and unconstrained ones and find that the cash flow sensitivity of cash asymmetry continues to hold in both groups. When we use institutional holding as a control for the agency problem, we find that firms with better outside monitoring dissave to capture good investment opportunities. All the results support our hypotheses that firms have different levels of responses to their cash holdings when facing positive and negative cash flows.
We examine the importance of financial constraints for firm investment by looking at the relationship between investment expenditures and proceeds from voluntary asset sales. Asset sales provide a cleaner indicator of liquidity than cash flows since it appears not to be positively correlated with investment opportunities. The cross-sectional differences in firm investment are examined using an endogenous switching regression model with unknown sample separation. We find that cash obtained from asset sales is a significant determinant of corporate investment and that the sensitivity of investment to proceeds from asset sales is significantly stronger for firms that are likely to be financially constrained.
The current account has always been a neglected variable in the management of the Euro area and in the assessment of its members' performance; so has, as a consequence, the savings-investment balance. This paper first reviews the arguments that explain this attitude and justify, under some conditions and in some cases, the persistence of current account deficits. It then examines some peculiar features of the growth experience under monetary union in four Euro area countries which do not conform to the conventional convergence pattern. Models establishing the optimality of a succession of current account deficits in a catching-up process implicitly assume that the intertemporal budget constraint is satisfied, so that the accumulation of foreign liabilities is matched by future surpluses. In section 3 we first introduce explicitly this constraint in a simple two-period, two-good model and show that its fulfilment requires that growth be driven by an adequate increase of the country's production capacity of traded goods and services. By examining the composition of output and demand we show that this has not been the case in the four countries considered and argue that monetary union has helped relax the necessary discipline. The common monetary policy moreover did nothing to prevent an extraordinary growth of credit that fed the imbalances in the four countries. The paper closes addressing some policy issues related to the future sustainability of the monetary union.
Financial systems are crucial to the allocation of resources in a modern economy. They channel household savings to the corporate sector and allocate investment funds among firms; they allow intertemporal smoothing of consumption by households and expenditures by firms; and they enable households and firms to share risks. These functions are common to the financial systems of most developed economies. Yet the form of these financial systems varies widely. Why do different countries have such different financial systems? Is one system better than all the others? Do different systems merely represent alternative ways of satisfying similar needs? Is the current trend toward market-based systems desirable? Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale argue that the view that market-based systems are best is simplistic. A more nuanced approach is necessary. Financial institutions are not simply veils, disguising the allocation mechanism without affecting it, but are crucial to overcoming market imperfections. An optimal financial system relies on both financial markets and financial intermediaries.
Why do corporations accumulate liquid assets? We show theoretically that intertemporal trade-offs between interest income taxation and the cost of external finance determine optimal savings. Intriguingly, we find that, controlling for Tobin's "q", saving and cash flow are negatively related because firms lower cash reserves to invest after receiving positive cash-flow shocks, and vice versa. Consistent with theory, we estimate negative propensities to save out of cash flow. We also find that income uncertainty affects saving more than do external finance constraints. Therefore, contrary to previous evidence, saving propensities reflect too many forces to be used to measure external finance constraints. Copyright (c) 2009 the American Finance Association.
The interpretation of the correlation between cash flow and investment is controversial. Some argue that it is caused by financial constraints, others by the correlation between cash flow and investment opportunities that are not properly measured by Tobin’s Q. This paper uses UK firms’ contracted capital expenditure to capture information about opportunities available only to insiders and thus not included in Q. When this variable is added to investment regressions, the explanatory power of cash flow falls for large firms, but remains unchanged for small firms. This suggests that the significance of cash flow stems from its role in capturing the effects of credit frictions.
The state of development of the financial sector does not change monotonically over time. In particular, by most measures, countries were more financially developed in 1913 than in 1980 and only recently have they surpassed their 1913 levels. To explain these changes, we propose an interest group theory of financial development where incumbents oppose financial development because it breeds competition. The theory predicts that incumbents’ opposition will be weaker when an economy allows both cross-border trade and capital flows. This theory can go some way in accounting for the cross-country differences in, and the time-series variation of, financial development.
This article is an attempt to solve (in the theoretical sense), through the use of isoquant analysis, the problem of optimal investment decisions (in business parlance, the problem of capital budgeting). The initial section reviews the principles laid down in Irving Fisher's justly famous works on interest to see what light they shed on two competing rules of behavior currently proposed by economists to guide business investment decisions - the present-value rule and the internal-rate-of return rule. The next concern of the paper is to show how Fisher's principles must be adapted when the perfect capital market assumed in his analysis does not exist - in particular, when borrowing and lending rates diverge, when capital can secured only at an increasing marginal borrowing rate, and when capital is "rationed". Section III, which presents the solution for multiperiod investments, corrects an error by Fisher which has been the source of much difficulty.
Many recent empirical investment studies have found that the investment of financially constrained firms responds strongly to cash flow. Paralleling these findings is the disappointing performance of the q theory of investment: even though marginal q should summarize the effects of all factors relevant to the investment decision, cash flow still matters. We examine whether this failure is due to error in measuring marginal q. Using measurement errorconsistent generalized method of moments estimators, we find that most of the stylized facts produced by investment-q cash flow regressions are artifacts of measurement error. Cash flow does not matter, even for financially constrained firms, and despite its simple structure, q theory has good explanatory power once purged of measurement error.
Work by Kaplan and Zingales provides both theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that investment-cash �ow sensitivities are not good indicators of �nancing constraints. Fazzari, Hubbard, and Petersen {this Journal} criticize those �ndings. In this note we explain how the Fazzari et al. criticisms are either very supportive of the claims in earlier work by Kaplan and Zingales or incorrect. We conclude with a discussion of unanswered questions. Fazzari, Hubbard, and Petersen {1988} (hereinafter, FHP {1988}) introduce a methodology to identify the presence of �nancing constraints based on the differential sensitivity of corporate investment to cash �ow. Kaplan and Zingales {1997} (hereinafter, KZ) provide both theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that this differential sensitivity is not a valid measure of �nancing constraints. Fazzari, Hubbard, and Petersen {2000} (hereinafter, FHP {2000}) criticize those �ndings. In this note we explain that the main arguments in FHP {2000} are, in fact, quite supportive of KZ’s main conclusion, while the speci�c criticisms in FHP {2000} are unjusti�ed. I. POINTS OF AGREEMENT FHP {2000} admit that �nancially distressed �rms are likely to have lower investment-cash �ow sensitivities than less �nancially constrained �rms. This is exactly the point that the KZ model makes: investment-cash �ow sensitivities are not necessarily monotonic in the degree of �nancing constraints. The only disagreement FHP {2000} have with KZ is how pervasive the nonmonotonicity result is. But this is ultimately an empirical question. FHP {2000} also recognize that the literature on investmentcash �ow sensitivities has not been based on a solid theoretical foundation. As KZ point out, the practice of (1) splitting the sample according to a measure of �nancing constraints and then
This article examines the role of operating cash flow in firm cash policies using an unbalanced panel of 988 Taiwanese firms. The main findings are as follows: (i) Both financially constrained and unconstrained firms display positive cash flow sensitivity of cash, indicating that capital market friction is prevalent in Taiwan. The result is in sharp contrast to the US result in Almeida et al. (2004) in that only constrained firms save cash out of their operating cash flow. (ii) The estimated cash flow sensitivity of cash for financially constrained firms is significantly higher than that of financially constrained firms in the USA. Our results imply that a financially constrained firm (i.e. a firm that is younger, has a looser relation with banks, or has negative investment-dividend correlation) saves 0.246 to 0.307 dollar out of an additional dollar of operating cash flow. An unconstrained firm saves 0.024 to 0.101 less dollars. (iii) Firms that have ever issued public debt save more cash out of their operating cash flow than firms that have never issued public debt. (iv) Omitting net debt and equity issuances from the cash regression produces downward-biased cash-cash flow sensitivity estimates.
We evaluate two models commonly used for measuring financial constraints in their ability to discriminate between constrained and unconstrained firms. We compute firm-specific estimates for the "cash flow sensitivity of investment" (CFSI), and the "cash flow sensitivity of cash" (CFSC) and provide a framework that summarizes the performance of each model into a single numerical metric. We argue that this 'ex-post' approach provides interesting advantages over the traditional operationalization, in which firms are classified 'ex-ante' on a theoretical basis. Our findings suggest the superiority of the CFSI model over the CFSC model for a sample of manufacturing SMEs in Belgium. Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
This paper proposes a theory of corporate liquidity demand and provides new evidence on corporate cash policies. Firms have access to valuable investment opportunities, but potentially cannot fund them with the use of external finance. Firms that are financially unconstrained can undertake all positive NPV projects regardless of their cash position, so their cash positions are irrelevant. In contrast, firms facing financial constraints have an optimal cash position determined by the value of today's investments relative to the expected value of future investments. The model predicts that constrained firms will save a positive fraction of incremental cash flows, while unconstrained firms will not. We also consider the impact of Jensen (1986) style overinvestment on the model's equilibrium, and derive conditions under which overinvestment affects corporate cash policies. We test the model's implications on a large sample of publicly-traded manufacturing firms over the 1981-2000 period, and find that firms classified as financially constrained save a positive fraction of their cash flows, while firms classified as unconstrained do not. Moreover, constrained firms save a higher fraction of cash inflows during recessions. These results are robust to the use of alternative proxies for financial constraints, and to several changes in the empirical specification. We also find weak evidence consistent with our agency-based model of corporate liquidity.
This essay surveys the body of research that asks how the efficiency of corporate investment is influenced by problems of asymmetric information and agency. I organize the material around two basic questions. First, does the external capital market channel the right amount of money to each firm? That is, does the market get across-firm allocations right, so that the marginal return to investment in firm i is the same as the marginal return to investment in firm j? Second, do internal capital markets channel the right amount of money to individual projects within firms? That is, does the internal capital budgeting process get within-firm allocations right, so that the marginal return to investment in firm i's division A is the same as the marginal return to investment in firm i's division B? In addition to discussing the theoretical and empirical work that bears most directly on these questions, the essay also briefly sketches some of the implications of this work for broader issues in both macroeconomics and the theory of the firm.
One possible explanation that bidding firms earned positive abnormal returns in diversifying acquisitions in the 1960s is that internal capital markets were expected to overcome the information deficiencies of the less developed capital markets. Examining 392 bidder firms during the 1960s, we find the highest bidder returns when financially unconstrained' buyers acquire constrained' targets. This result holds while controlling for merger terms and for different proxies used to classify firms facing costly external financing. We also find that bidders generally retain target management, suggesting that management may have provided company-specific operational information, while the bidder provided capital-budgeting expertise.
We model a firm's demand for liquidity to develop a new test of the effect of financial constraints on corporate policies. The effect of financial constraints is captured by the firm's propensity to save cash out of cash flows (the "cash flow sensitivity of cash"). We hypothesize that constrained firms should have a positive cash flow sensitivity of cash, while unconstrained firms' cash savings should not be systematically related to cash flows. We empirically estimate the cash flow sensitivity of cash using a large sample of manufacturing firms over the 1971 to 2000 period and find robust support for our theory. Copyright 2004 by The American Finance Association.
Asymmetric information models predict a 'pecking order' which reflects a combination of owner-manager preferences and external capital supply constraints whenever insiders know more about the true value of the firm's prospects than outsiders. The pecking order results in retained earnings being the most preferred source of finance, then debt and finally the issue of new shares to outsiders. Using a sample of 629 UK SMEs over the five-year period from 1990 to 1995 we find evidence consistent with a pecking order in which retained equity is preferred over debt. As expected, the evidence of a pecking order was particularly strong in respect of the closely-held firms in our sample. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.
Over the past decade, a number of researchers have extended conventional models of business fixed investment to incorporate a role for "financial constraints" in determining investment. This paper reviews developments and challenges in this empirical research, and uses advances in models of information and incentive problems to motivate those developments and challenges. First, I describe analytical underpinnings of models of capital-market imperfections in the investment process, and illustrate the principal testable implications of those models. Second, I motivate tests and describe and critique existing empirical studies. Third, the review considers applications of the underlying models to a range of investment activities, including inventory investment, R&D, employment demand, pricing by imperfectly competitive firms, business formation and survival, and risk management. Fourth, I discuss implications of this research program for analysis of effects of investment of monetary policy and tax policy. Finally, I examine some potentially fruitful avenues for future research.
This paper examines the relation between cash-flow availability and investment spending in the Netherlands. In particular, we are interested whether managerial discretion and/or asymmetric information drive the positive relation between cash-flow and investment spending. This relation is positive for both firms with low and high investment opportunities. It is however significantly larger for firms with low investment opportunities suggesting that the managerial-discretion problem is most important in the Dutch setting. Effective corporate-governance may reduce this agency problem. Specific to the Netherlands, firms with low shareholder influence posit a higher cash-flow-investment sensitivity. The relevance of asymmetric information is confirmed as smaller firms and firms from information-sensitive industries show a larger cash-flow-investment sensitivity.
Firm investment decisions are shown to be directly related to financial factors. Investment decisions of firms with high creditworthiness (according to traditional financial ratios) are extremely sensitive to the availability of internal funds; less creditworthy firms are much less sensitive to internal fund availability. This large sample evidence is based on an objective sorting mechanism and supports the results of Kaplan and Zingales (1997), who also find that investment outlays of the least constrained firms are the most sensitive to internal cash flow. Copyright The American Finance Association 1999.
We investigate the investment-cash flow sensitivity of a large sample of the UK listed firms and confirm that investment is strongly cash flow-sensitive. Is this suboptimal investment policy the result of agency problems when managers with high discretion overinvest, or of asymmetric information when managers owning equity are underinvesting if the market (erroneously) demands too high a risk premium? We find that the observed cash flow sensitivity results mainly from the agency costs of free cash flow. The magnitude of the relationship depends on insider ownership in a nonmonotonic way. Furthermore, we obtain that outside blockholders, such as financial institutions, the government, and industrial firms (only at high control levels), reduce the cash flow sensitivity of investment via effective monitoring. Finally, financial institutions appear to play a role in mitigating informational asymmetries between firms and capital markets. We corroborate our findings by performing additional tests based on the stochastic efficient frontier approach and power indices.
The interests and incentives of managers and shareholders conflict over such issues as the optimal size of the firm and the payment of cash to shareholders. These conflicts are especially severe in firms with large free cash flows--more cash than profitable investment opportunities. The theory developed here explains 1) the benefits of debt in reducing agency costs of free cash flows, 2) how debt can substitute for dividends, 3) why diversification programs are more likely to generate losses than takeovers or expansion in the same line of business or liquidation-motivated takeovers, 4) why the factors generating takeover activity in such diverse activities as broadcasting and tobacco are similar to those in oil, and 5) why bidders and some targets tend to perform abnormally well prior to takeover.
We survey recent microeconometric research on investment and employment that has used panel data on individual firms or plants. We focus on model specification and econometric estimation issues, but we also review some of the main empirical findings. We discuss advantages and limitations of microeconomic data in this context. We briefly review the neoclassical theory of the demand for capital and labour, on which most of the econometric models of investment and employment that we consider are based. We pay particular attention to dynamic factor demand models, based on the assumption that there are costs of adjustment, which have played a prominent role especially in the microeconometric literature on investment. With adjustment costs, current choices depend on expectations of future conditions. We discuss the challenges that this raises for econometric model specification, and some of the solutions that have been adopted. We also discuss estimation issues that arise for dynamic factor demand equations in the context of micro panel data for firms or plants. We then discuss a number of topics that have been the focus of recent microeconometric research on investment and employment. In particular, we review the literatures on investment and financing constraints, relative price effects on investment and employment, investment in research and development (R&D), elasticities of substitution and complementarity between technology, capital and skilled and unskilled labour, and recent work on models with non-convex adjustment costs.
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