Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'invest'
The following papers contain search terms that you selected. From the papers listed below, you can navigate to the PDF, the profile page for that working paper, or see all the working papers written by an author. You can also explore tags, keywords, and authors that occur frequently within these papers.
See Working Papers by Tag(s), Keywords(s), Author(s), or Search Text
Click here to search again
Frequently Occurring Concepts within this Search
Authors
Matthias Kehrig - 3
Nicolas Vincent - 3
Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 23
-
Working PaperGood Dispersion, Bad Dispersion
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-13
We document that most dispersion in marginal revenue products of inputs occurs across plants within firms rather than between firms. This is commonly thought to reflect misallocation: dispersion is 'bad.' However, we show that eliminating frictions hampering internal capital markets in a multi-plant firm model may in fact increase productivity dispersion and raise output: dispersion can be 'good.' This arises as firms optimally stagger investment activity across their plants over time to avoid raising costly external finance, instead relying on reallocating internal funds. The staggering in turn generates dispersion in marginal revenue products. We use U.S. Census data on multi-plant manufacturing firms to provide empirical evidence for the model mechanism and show a quantitatively important role for good dispersion. Since there is less scope for good dispersion in emerging economies, the difference in the degree of misallocation between emerging and developed economies looks more pronounced than previously thought.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperResearch and/or Development? Financial Frictions and Innovation Investment
August 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-39
U.S. firms have reduced their investment in scientific research ('R') compared to product development ('D'), raising questions about the returns to each type of investment, and about the reasons for this shift. We use Census data that disaggregates 'R' from 'D' to study how US firms adjust their innovation investments in response to an external increase in funding cost. Companies with greater demand for refinancing during the 2008 financial crisis, made larger cuts to R&D investment. This reduction in R&D is achieved almost entirely by reducing investment in research. Development remains essentially unchanged. If other firms patenting similar technologies must refinance, however, then Development investment declines. We interpret the latter result as evidence of technological competition: firms are reluctant to cut Development expenditures when that could place them at a disadvantage compared to potential rivals.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperInvestment and Subjective Uncertainty
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-52
A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers' subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed new survey measure of subjective uncertainty collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for approximately 25,000 manufacturing plants. We find three key results. First, investment is strongly and robustly negatively associated with higher uncertainty, with a two standard deviation increase in uncertainty associated with about a 6% reduction in investment. Second, uncertainty is also negatively related to employment growth and overall shipments (sales) growth, which highlights the damaging impact of uncertainty on firm growth. Third, flexible inputs like rental capital and temporary workers show a positive relationship to uncertainty, demonstrating that businesses switch from less flexible to more flexible factor inputs at higher levels of uncertainty.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperR&D or R vs. D? Firm Innovation Strategy and Equity Ownership
April 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-14
We analyze a unique dataset that separately reports research and development expenditures for a large panel of public and private firms. Definitions of 'research' and 'development' in this dataset, respectively, correspond to definitions of knowledge 'exploration' and 'exploitation' in the innovation theory literature. We can thus test theories of how equity ownership status relates to innovation strategy. We find that public firms have greater research intensity than private firms, inconsistent with theories asserting private ownership is more conducive to exploration. We also find public firms invest more intensely in innovation of all sorts. These results suggest relaxed financing constraints enjoyed by public firms, as well as their diversified shareholder bases, make them more conducive to investing in all types of innovation. Reconciling several seemingly conflicting results in prior research, we find private-equity-owned firms, though not less innovative overall than other private firms, skew their innovation strategies toward development and away from research.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDo Short-Term Incentives Affect Long-Term Productivity?
March 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-10
Previous research shows that stock repurchases that are caused by earnings management lead to reductions in firm-level investment and employment. It is natural to expect firms to cut less productive investment and employment first, which could lead to a positive effect on firm-level productivity. However, using Census data, we find that firms make cuts across the board irrespective of plant productivity. This pattern seems to be associated with frictions in the labor market. Specifically, we find evidence that unionization of the labor force may prevent firms from doing efficient downsizing, forcing them to engage in easy or expedient downsizing instead. As a result of this inefficient downsizing, EPS-driven repurchases lead to a reduction in long-term productivity.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDo Firms Mitigate or Magnify Capital Misallocation? Evidence from Plant-Level Data
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-14
Almost two thirds of the cross-plant dispersion in marginal revenue products of capital occurs across plants within the same firm rather than between firms. Even though firms allocate investment very differently across their plants, they do not equalize marginal revenue products across their plants. We reconcile these findings in a model of multi-plant firms, physical adjustment costs and credit constraints. Credit constrained multi-plant firms can utilize internal capital markets by concentrating internal funds on investment projects in only a few of their plants in a given period and rotating funds to another set of plants in the future. The resulting increase in within-firm dispersion of marginal revenue products of capital is hence not a symptom of misallocation within the firm, but rather actions taken by the firm to mitigate external credit constraints and adjustment costs of capital. Economies with multi-plant firms produce more aggregate output despite higher dispersion in marginal revenue products of capital compared to economies with single-plant firms. Because emerging economies are predominantly populated by single-plant firms, the gains from reducing their distortions to the level of developed are larger than previously thought.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperReconciling the Firm Size and Innovation Puzzle
March 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-20RR
There is a prevailing view in both the academic literature and the popular press that firms need to behave more entrepreneurially. This view is reinforced by a stylized fact in the innovation literature that R&D productivity decreases with size. However, there is a second stylized fact in the innovation literature that R&D investment increases with size. Taken together, these stylized facts create a puzzle of seemingly irrational behavior by large firms--they are increasing spending despite decreasing returns. This paper is an effort to resolve that puzzle. We propose and test two alternative resolutions: 1) that it arises from mismeasurement of R&D productivity, and 2) that firm size endogenously drives R&D strategy, and that the returns to R&D strategies depend on scale. We are able to resolve the puzzle under the first tack--using a recent measure of R&D productivity, RQ, we find that both R&D spending and R&D productivity increase with scale. We had less success with the second tack--while firm size affects R&D strategy in the manners expected by theory, there is no strategy whose returns decrease in scale. Taken together, our results are consistent with the Schumpeter view that large firms are the major engine of growth, they both spend more in aggregate than small firms, and are more productive with that spending. Moreover the prescription that firms should behave more entrepreneurially, should be treated with caution--one small firm strategy has lower returns to scale than its large firm counterpart.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperA Portrait of Firms that Invest in R&D
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-41
We focus on the evolution and behavior of firms that invest in research and development (R&D). We build upon the cross-sectional analysis in Foster and Grim (2010) that identified the characteristics of top R&D spending firms and follow up by charting the behavior of these firms over time. Our focus is dynamic in nature as we merge micro-level cross-sectional data from the Survey of Industrial Research and Development (SIRD) and the Business Research & Development and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) with the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). The result is a panel firm-level data set from 1992 to 2011 that tracks firms' performances as they enter and exit the R&D surveys. Using R&D expenditures to proxy R&D performance, we find the top R&D performing firms in the U.S. across all years to be large, old, multinational enterprises. However, we also find that the composition of R&D performing firms is gradually shifting more towards smaller domestic firms with expenditures being less sensitive to scale effects. We find a high degree of persistence for these firms over time. We chart the history of R&D performing firms and compare them to all firms in the economy and find substantial differences in terms of age, size, firm structure and international activity; these differences persist when looking at future firm outcomes.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperFinancial Frictions and Investment Dynamics in Multi-Plant Firms
October 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-56
Using confidential Census data on U.S. manufacturing plants, we document that most of the dispersion in investment rates across plants occurs within rms instead of across firms. Between- firm dispersion is almost acyclical, but within- rm dispersion is strongly procyclical. To investigate the role of rms in the allocation of capital in the economy, we build a multi-plant model of the firm with frictions at both levels of aggregation. We show that external nancing constraints at the level of the rm can have important implications for plant-level investment dynamics. Finally, we present empirical evidence supporting the predictions of the model.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperINTERNAL LABOR MARKETS AND INVESTMENT IN CONGLOMERATES
May 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-26
The literature on conglomerates has focused on the misallocation of investments as the cause of the conglomerate discount. I study frictions in the internal labor market as a possible cause of misallocation of investments. Using detailed plant-level data, I document wage convergence in conglomerates: workersin low-wage industries collect higher-than-industry wages when the diversified rm is also present in high-wage industries (by 5.2%). I con rm this effect by exploiting a quasi-experiment involving the implementation of the NAFTA agreement that exogenously increases worker wages of exporting plants. I track the evolution of wages in non-exporting plants in diversi ed rms that also own exporting plants and nd a signi cant increase in wages of these plants relative to una liated non-exporting plants after the event. This pattern of wage convergence affects investments. Plants where workers collect higher-than-industry wages increase the capital-labor ratio in response to their higher labor cost -- and this response to higher wages is associated with higher investment in some divisions.View Full Paper PDF
