IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jeborg/v177y2020icp618-640.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Are financing constraints binding for investment? Evidence from a natural experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Bilicka, Katarzyna

Abstract

This paper shows that the availability of cash flows dominates the effects of cost of capital for investment at the firm level. Using an exogenous tax reform in Canada as a quasi-natural experiment, I find that a temporary and unexpected increase in the cost of capital for firms with low availability of retained earnings has no effect on investment of those firms. A subsequent direct increase in the availability of cash flows has large effects on investment. This suggests that internal financing constraints are binding for firms, as they prefer to use low cost retained earnings to finance their investment.

Suggested Citation

  • Bilicka, Katarzyna, 2020. "Are financing constraints binding for investment? Evidence from a natural experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 177(C), pages 618-640.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:177:y:2020:i:c:p:618-640
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2020.06.029
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268120302195
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jebo.2020.06.029?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hassett, Kevin A. & Hubbard, R. Glenn, 2002. "Tax policy and business investment," Handbook of Public Economics, in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 20, pages 1293-1343, Elsevier.
    2. Steven M. Fazzari & Bruce C. Petersen, 1993. "Working Capital and Fixed Investment: New Evidence on Financing Constraints," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 24(3), pages 328-342, Autumn.
    3. Auerbach, Alan J & Hines, James R, Jr, 1988. "Investment Tax Incentives and Frequent Tax Reforms," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(2), pages 211-216, May.
    4. Christopher A. Hennessy & Toni M. Whited, 2007. "How Costly Is External Financing? Evidence from a Structural Estimation," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 62(4), pages 1705-1745, August.
    5. Mervyn A. King & Don Fullerton, 1984. "The United Kingdom," NBER Chapters, in: The Taxation of Income from Capital: A Comparative Study of the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany, pages 31-86, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Mark Gertler & R. Glenn Hubbard, 1988. "Financial factors in business fluctuations," Proceedings - Economic Policy Symposium - Jackson Hole, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pages 33-78.
    7. Fazzari, Steven M & Hubbard, R Glenn & Petersen, Bruce C, 1988. "Investment, Financing Decisions, and Tax Policy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(2), pages 200-205, May.
    8. Bond, Stephen & Van Reenen, John, 2007. "Microeconometric Models of Investment and Employment," Handbook of Econometrics, in: J.J. Heckman & E.E. Leamer (ed.), Handbook of Econometrics, edition 1, volume 6, chapter 65, Elsevier.
    9. Mervyn A. King & Don Fullerton, 1984. "Introduction to "The Taxation of Income from Capital: A Comparative Study of the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany"," NBER Chapters, in: The Taxation of Income from Capital: A Comparative Study of the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany, pages 1-6, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Joan Farre-Mensa & Alexander Ljungqvist, 2016. "Do Measures of Financial Constraints Measure Financial Constraints?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 29(2), pages 271-308.
    11. Mervyn A. King & Don Fullerton, 1984. "The United States," NBER Chapters, in: The Taxation of Income from Capital: A Comparative Study of the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany, pages 193-267, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Michael Devereux & Rachel Griffith, 1998. "The taxation of discrete investment choices," IFS Working Papers W98/16, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    13. Aydoḡan Alti, 2003. "How Sensitive Is Investment to Cash Flow When Financing Is Frictionless?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 58(2), pages 707-722, April.
    14. Alan J. Auerbach & James R. Hines, Jr., 1987. "Anticipated Tax Changes and the Timing of Investment," NBER Chapters, in: Taxes and Capital Formation, pages 85-92, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Alan J. Auerbach, 1979. "Wealth Maximization and the Cost of Capital," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 93(3), pages 433-446.
    16. Craig Doidge & Alexander Dyck, 2015. "Taxes and Corporate Policies: Evidence from a Quasi Natural Experiment," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 70(1), pages 45-89, February.
    17. Mervyn A. King & Don Fullerton, 1984. "The Taxation of Income from Capital: A Comparative Study of the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number king84-1.
    18. Christopher L. House & Matthew D. Shapiro, 2008. "Temporary Investment Tax Incentives: Theory with Evidence from Bonus Depreciation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(3), pages 737-768, June.
    19. Borisova, Ginka & Brown, James R., 2013. "R&D sensitivity to asset sale proceeds: New evidence on financing constraints and intangible investment," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 159-173.
    20. Calomiris, Charles W & Hubbard, R Glenn, 1995. "Internal Finance and Investment: Evidence from the Undistributed Profits Tax of 1936-37," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 68(4), pages 443-482, October.
    21. Jeremy Edwards, 1984. "The 1984 corporation tax reform," Fiscal Studies, Institute for Fiscal Studies, vol. 5(2), pages 30-44, May.
    22. Howitt, Peter & Sinn, Hans-Werner, 1989. "Gradual Reforms of Capital Income Taxation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(1), pages 106-124, March.
    23. Eric Ohrn, 2018. "The Effect of Corporate Taxation on Investment and Financial Policy: Evidence from the DPAD," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 10(2), pages 272-301, May.
    24. Tobin, James, 1969. "A General Equilibrium Approach to Monetary Theory," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 1(1), pages 15-29, February.
    25. Edwards, Alexander & Shevlin, Terry, 2011. "The value of a flow-through entity in an integrated corporate tax system," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 101(2), pages 473-491, August.
    26. Michael Devereux, 1988. "Corporation tax: the effect of the 1984 reforms in the incentive to invest," Fiscal Studies, Institute for Fiscal Studies, vol. 9(1), pages 62-79, February.
    27. Eric Zwick & James Mahon, 2017. "Tax Policy and Heterogeneous Investment Behavior," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(1), pages 217-248, January.
    28. Edgerton, Jesse, 2010. "Investment incentives and corporate tax asymmetries," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(11-12), pages 936-952, December.
    29. Steven N. Kaplan & Luigi Zingales, 1997. "Do Investment-Cash Flow Sensitivities Provide Useful Measures of Financing Constraints?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 112(1), pages 169-215.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Peng, Fei & Zhou, Shibiao & Zhou, Peng, 2023. "Local government fiscal stress and corporate risk-taking: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in China," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 1677-1695.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Isaac Baley & Andrés Blanco, 2022. "The long-run effects of corporate tax reforms," Economics Working Papers 1813, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    2. Walch, Florian & Dwenger, Nadja, 2011. "Tax Losses and Firm Investment: Evidence from Tax Statistics," VfS Annual Conference 2011 (Frankfurt, Main): The Order of the World Economy - Lessons from the Crisis 48699, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    3. Isaac Baley & Andrés Blanco, 2022. "The Macroeconomics of Partial Irreversibility," Working Papers 1312, Barcelona School of Economics.
    4. Guceri, Irem & Albinowski, Maciej, 2021. "Investment responses to tax policy under uncertainty," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(3), pages 1147-1170.
    5. Jean-Bernard Chatelain, 2003. "Structural modelling of financial constraints on investment: where do we stand?," Chapters, in: Paul Butzen & Catherine Fuss (ed.), Firms’ Investment and Finance Decisions, chapter 2, pages 40-58, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    6. Ligia Alba Melo-Becerra & Javier Ávila Mahecha & Jorge Enrique Ramos-Forero, 2017. "The Effect of Corporate Taxes on Investment: Evidence from the Colombian Firms," IHEID Working Papers 10-2017, Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies.
    7. Sumru Altug & Fanny S. Demers & Michel Demers, 2004. "Tax Policy and Irreversible Investment," CDMA Working Paper Series 200404, Centre for Dynamic Macroeconomic Analysis.
    8. Jason Cummins & R. Glenn Hubbard, 1995. "The Tax Sensitivity of Foreign Direct Investment: Evidence from Firm-Level Panel Data," NBER Chapters, in: The Effects of Taxation on Multinational Corporations, pages 123-152, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Elias Steinmüller & Georg U. Thunecke & Georg Wamser, 2019. "Corporate income taxes around the world: a survey on forward-looking tax measures and two applications," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 26(2), pages 418-456, April.
    10. Ligia Alba Melo-Becerra & Héctor Zárate-Solano & Andrés Camilo Gómez-Molina, 2018. "Elasticidad del ingreso corporativo gravable en Colombia," Borradores de Economia 1046, Banco de la Republica de Colombia.
    11. Sinn, H.W., 1990. "Taxation And The Birth Of Foreign Subsidiaries," Papers 66, Princeton, Woodrow Wilson School - Discussion Paper.
    12. Cummins, Jason G. & Hassett, Kevin A. & Hubbard, R. Glenn, 1996. "Tax reforms and investment: A cross-country comparison," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(1-2), pages 237-273, October.
    13. Lindhe, Tobias & Södersten, Jan, 2013. "Distortive Effects of Dividend Taxation," Working Paper Series 2013:16, Uppsala University, Department of Economics.
    14. Ernesto Zangari, 2020. "An economic assessment of the evolution of the corporate tax system in Italy," Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) 1291, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    15. Simeon Djankov & Tim Ganser & Caralee McLiesh & Rita Ramalho & Andrei Shleifer, 2010. "The Effect of Corporate Taxes on Investment and Entrepreneurship," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(3), pages 31-64, July.
    16. Tobias Lindhe & Jan Södersten, 2016. "Dividend Taxation and the Cost of New Share Issues," FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 72(2), pages 158-174, June.
    17. Occhino, Filippo, 2023. "The macroeconomic effects of business tax cuts with debt financing and accelerated depreciation," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 125(C).
    18. Roger Gordon & Laura Kalambokidis & Joel Slemrod, 2003. "A New Summary Measure of the Effective Tax Rate on Investment," NBER Working Papers 9535, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Ligia Alba Melo-Becerra & Javier Ávila Mahecha & Jorge Enrique Ramos-Forero, 2021. "Corporate Taxation and Investment: Evidence from a Context of Frequent Tax Reforms," Hacienda Pública Española / Review of Public Economics, IEF, vol. 237(2), pages 3-31, June.
    20. Liu, Xiaohan & Liu, Jianmin & Wu, Haitao & Hao, Yu, 2022. "Do tax reductions stimulate firm productivity? A quasi-natural experiment from China," Economic Systems, Elsevier, vol. 46(4).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Investment; Financing constraints; Retained earnings; Income trusts;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H25 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Business Taxes and Subsidies
    • H32 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Firm

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:177:y:2020:i:c:p:618-640. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jebo .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.