IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedgif/557.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Firm size and the impact of profit-margin uncertainty on investment: do financing constraints play a role?

Author

Listed:
  • Vivek Ghosal
  • Prakash Loungani

Abstract

We study the response of investment to changes in uncertainty about future profits. We find that in industries dominated by small firms, an increase in uncertainty about future profits depresses investment; in all other industries, increased uncertainty has virtually no effect (or has a positive effect) on investment. The data set from which these findings emerge is a balanced panel, consisting of annual data from 1958 to 1991 for 252 manufacturing industries in the United States. The theoretical work on this topic points to uncertainty about future profit flows as one of the important actors that determines the ease with which firms can access external credit. The prediction made by the theory is that an increase in uncertainty exacerbates informational asymmetries, and hence makes lenders reduce the flow of credit; this in turn lowers investment in credit-constrained firms. If one is willing to accept firm size as a proxy for access to external credit, then our finding that greater uncertainty lowers investment in small-firm-dominated industries is consistent with the theoretical prediction.

Suggested Citation

  • Vivek Ghosal & Prakash Loungani, 1996. "Firm size and the impact of profit-margin uncertainty on investment: do financing constraints play a role?," International Finance Discussion Papers 557, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgif:557
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/1996/557/default.htm
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/1996/557/ifdp557.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mark Gertler, 1988. "Financial structure and aggregate economic activity: an overview," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, pages 559-596.
    2. Chirinko, Robert S, 1993. "Business Fixed Investment Spending: Modeling Strategies, Empirical Results, and Policy Implications," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 31(4), pages 1875-1911, December.
    3. Ian Domowitz & R. Glenn Hubbard & Bruce C. Petersen, 1986. "Business Cycles and the Relationship Between Concentration and Price-Cost Margins," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 17(1), pages 1-17, Spring.
    4. Steven N. Kaplan & Luigi Zingales, 1995. "Do Financing Constraints Explain Why Investment is Correlated with Cash Flow?," NBER Working Papers 5267, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. 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.
    6. Robert S. Chirinko, 1992. "Business Fixed Investment Spending: A Critical survey of Modeling Strategies, Empirical Results, and Policy Implications," Working Papers 9213, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago.
    7. Ramey, Valerie, 1993. "How important is the credit channel in the transmission of monetary policy?," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 1-45, December.
    8. Calomiris, Charles W & Hubbard, R Glenn, 1990. "Firm Heterogeneity, Internal Finance, and 'Credit Rationing.'," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 100(399), pages 90-104, March.
    9. Mark Gertler & Simon Gilchrist, 1994. "Monetary Policy, Business Cycles, and the Behavior of Small Manufacturing Firms," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 109(2), pages 309-340.
    10. Caballero, Ricardo J, 1991. "On the Sign of the Investment-Uncertainty Relationship," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(1), pages 279-288, March.
    11. Pindyck, Robert S, 1991. "Irreversibility, Uncertainty, and Investment," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 29(3), pages 1110-1148, September.
    12. Greenwald, Bruce & Stiglitz, Joseph E & Weiss, Andrew, 1984. "Informational Imperfections in the Capital Market and Macroeconomic Fluctuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 74(2), pages 194-199, May.
    13. Ghosal, Vivek, 1996. "Does uncertainty influence the number of firms in an industry?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 50(2), pages 229-236, February.
    14. Domowitz, Ian & Hubbard, R Glenn & Petersen, Bruce C, 1987. "Oligopoly Supergames: Some Empirical Evidence on Prices and Margins," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(4), pages 379-398, June.
    15. R. Glenn Hubbard, 1994. "Investment under Uncertainty: Keeping One's Options Open," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 32(4), pages 1816-1831, December.
    16. Dennis D. Miller, 1990. "Perspective," Challenge, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(3), pages 58-61, May.
    17. Avinash K. Dixit & Robert S. Pindyck, 1994. "Investment under Uncertainty," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 5474.
    18. Leahy, John V & Whited, Toni M, 1996. "The Effect of Uncertainty on Investment: Some Stylized Facts," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 28(1), pages 64-83, February.
    19. Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason, 1990. "Do Firms Care Who Provides Their Financing?," NBER Chapters, in: Asymmetric Information, Corporate Finance, and Investment, pages 63-104, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Steven M. Fazzari & R. Glenn Hubbard & Bruce C. Petersen, 1988. "Financing Constraints and Corporate Investment," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 19(1), pages 141-206.
    21. Jason G. Cummins & Kevin A. Hassett & R. Glenn Hubbard, 1994. "A Reconsideration of Investment Behavior Using Tax Reforms as Natural Experiments," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 25(2), pages 1-74.
    22. Chirinko, Robert S & Schaller, Huntley, 1995. "Why Does Liquidity Matter in Investment Equations?," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 27(2), pages 527-548, May.
    23. Caballero, Ricardo J & Pindyck, Robert S, 1996. "Uncertainty, Investment, and Industry Evolution," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 37(3), pages 641-662, August.
    24. Michael Devereux & Fabio Schiantarelli, 1990. "Investment, Financial Factors, and Cash Flow: Evidence from U.K. Panel Data," NBER Chapters, in: Asymmetric Information, Corporate Finance, and Investment, pages 279-306, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    25. Bruce C. Greenwald & Joseph E. Stiglitz, 1990. "Macroeconomic Models with Equity and Credit Rationing," NBER Chapters, in: Asymmetric Information, Corporate Finance, and Investment, pages 15-42, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    26. Davis, Steven J & Haltiwanger, John & Schuh, Scott, 1996. "Small Business and Job Creation: Dissecting the Myth and Reassessing the Facts," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 8(4), pages 297-315, August.
    27. R. Schmalensee & R. Willig (ed.), 1989. "Handbook of Industrial Organization," Handbook of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 1, number 1.
    28. Huizinga, John, 1993. "Inflation Uncertainty, Relative Price Uncertainty, and Investment in U.S. Manufacturing," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 25(3), pages 521-549, August.
    29. Ben Bernanke & Mark Gertler, 1990. "Financial Fragility and Economic Performance," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 105(1), pages 87-114.
    30. Schmalensee, Richard, 1989. "Inter-industry studies of structure and performance," Handbook of Industrial Organization, in: R. Schmalensee & R. Willig (ed.), Handbook of Industrial Organization, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 16, pages 951-1009, Elsevier.
    31. Caves, Richard E & Porter, Michael E, 1980. "The Dynamics of Changing Seller Concentration," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(1), pages 1-15, September.
    32. Steven M. Fazzari & R. Glenn Hubbard & Bruce C. Petersen, 1996. "Financing Constraints and Corporate Investment: Response to Kaplan and Zingales," NBER Working Papers 5462, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    33. Craine, Roger, 1989. "Risky business : The allocation of capital," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 23(2), pages 201-218, March.
    34. R. Schmalensee & R. Willig (ed.), 1989. "Handbook of Industrial Organization," Handbook of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 2, number 2.
    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. Debarati Ghosh & Meghna Dutta, 2021. "Investment behaviour under financial constraints: a study of Indian firms," SN Business & Economics, Springer, vol. 1(8), pages 1-15, August.
    2. Driffield, Nigel & Pal, Sarmistha, 2001. "The East Asian crisis and financing corporate investment: is there a cause for concern?," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 12(4), pages 507-527.

    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. Ghosal, Vivek & Loungani, Prakash, 1996. "Product Market Competition and the Impact of Price Uncertainty on Investment: Some Evidence from US Manufacturing Industries," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(2), pages 217-228, June.
    2. Henriques, Irene & Sadorsky, Perry, 2011. "The effect of oil price volatility on strategic investment," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 79-87, January.
    3. Ghosal, Vivek, 2007. "Small is Beautiful but Size Matters: The Asymmetric Impact of Uncertainty and Sunk Costs on Small and Large Businesses," MPRA Paper 5461, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Ghosal, Vivek, 2002. "Impact of Uncertainty and Sunk Costs on Firm Survival and Industry Dynamics," Royal Economic Society Annual Conference 2002 86, Royal Economic Society.
    5. Anna Bottasso, 1996. "Firms’ Financial Structure And Real Decisions: A Critical Survey Of The Empirical Literature," CERIS Working Paper 199623, CNR-IRCrES Research Institute on Sustainable Economic Growth - Torino (TO) ITALY - former Institute for Economic Research on Firms and Growth - Moncalieri (TO) ITALY.
    6. Vivek Ghosal, 2003. "Firm and Establishment Volatility: The Role of Sunk Costs, Profit Uncertainty and Technological Change," CESifo Working Paper Series 980, CESifo.
    7. 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.
    8. Vivek Ghosal & Yang Ye, 2015. "Uncertainty and the employment dynamics of small and large businesses," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 44(3), pages 529-558, March.
    9. Ghosal, Vivek, 2000. "Product market competition and the industry price-cost markup fluctuations:: role of energy price and monetary changes," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 18(3), pages 415-444, April.
    10. Klaus Gugler & Mario Liebensteiner & Adhurim Haxhimusa & Nora Schindler, 2016. "Investment under Uncertainty in Electricity Generation," Department of Economics Working Papers wuwp234, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Department of Economics.
    11. Ghosal, Vivek & Ye, Yang, 2019. "The impact of uncertainty on the number of businesses," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 105(C).
    12. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2018. "Frontiers of macrofinancial linkages," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 95.
    13. Vivek Ghosal, 2003. "Endemic Volatility of Firms and Establishments: Are Real Options Effects Important?," CIG Working Papers SP II 2003-13, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), Research Unit: Competition and Innovation (CIG).
    14. Hyun-Euy Kim, 2007. "The Interest Rate Channel of Monetary Transmission under Low Inflation in Korea (in Korean)," Economic Analysis (Quarterly), Economic Research Institute, Bank of Korea, vol. 13(1), pages 1-56, March.
    15. Hjalmar Böhm & Michael Funke & Nikolaus A. Siegfried, 1999. "Discovering the Link between Uncertainty and Investment - Microeconometric Evidence from Germany," Quantitative Macroeconomics Working Papers 19906, Hamburg University, Department of Economics.
    16. Panagiotidis, Theodore & Printzis, Panagiotis, 2020. "What is the investment loss due to uncertainty?," Global Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 45(C).
    17. Fabio Busetti & Claire Giordano & Giordano Zevi, 2016. "The Drivers of Italy’s Investment Slump During the Double Recession," Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti, Springer;Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association), vol. 2(2), pages 143-165, July.
    18. John A. List & Michael S. Haigh, 2010. "Investment Under Uncertainty: Testing the Options Model with Professional Traders," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(4), pages 974-984, November.
    19. Ahmadi, Maryam & Manera, Matteo & Sadeghzadeh, Mehdi, 2019. "The investment-uncertainty relationship in the oil and gas industry," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 1-1.
    20. Pratap, Sangeeta, 2003. "Do adjustment costs explain investment-cash flow insensitivity?," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 27(11-12), pages 1993-2006, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Business enterprises; Investments;

    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:fip:fedgif:557. 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: Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbgvus.html .

    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.