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An empirical model of inventory investment by durable commodity intermediaries

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  • Hall, George
  • Rust, John

Abstract

This paper introduces a new detailed data set of high-frequency observations on inventory investment by a U.S. steel wholesaler. Our analysis of these data leads to six main conclusions: orders and sales are made infrequently; orders are more volatile than sales; order sizes vary considerably; there is substantial high-frequency variation in the firm's sales prices; inventory/sales ratios are unstable; and there are occasional stockouts. We model the firm generically as a durable commodity intermediary that engages in commodity price speculation. We demonstrate that the firm's inventory investment behavior at the product level is well approximated by an optimal trading strategy from the solution to a nonlinear dynamic programming problem with two continuous state variables and one continuous control variable that is subject to frequently binding inequality constraints. We show that the optimal trading strategy is a generalized (S,s) rule. That is, whenever the firm's inventory level q falls below the order threshold s(p) the firm places an order of size S(p) - q in order to attain a target inventory level S(p) satisfying S(p) >= s(p), where p is the current spot price at which the firm can purchase unlimited amounts of the commodity after incurring a fixed order cost K. We show that the (S,s) bands are decreasing functions of p, capturing the basic intuition of commodity price speculation, namely, that it is optimal for the firm to hold higher inventories when the spot price is low than when it is high in order to profit from "buying low and selling high." We simulate a calibrated version of this model and show that the simulated data exhibit the key features of inventory investment we observe in the data.

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Bibliographic Info

Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy.

Volume (Year): 52 (2000)
Issue (Month): 1 (June)
Pages: 171-214

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Handle: RePEc:eee:crcspp:v:52:y:2000:i:1:p:171-214

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References

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  1. Deaton, A. & Laroque, G., 1989. "On The Behavior Of Commodity Prices," Papers 145, Princeton, Woodrow Wilson School - Public and International Affairs.
  2. Blanchard, Olivier J, 1983. "The Production and Inventory Behavior of the American Automobile Industry," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 91(3), pages 365-400, June.
  3. Fair, Ray C., 1989. "The production-smoothing model is alive and well," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(3), pages 353-370, November.
  4. James A. Kahn & Mark Bils, 2000. "What Inventory Behavior Tells Us about Business Cycles," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(3), pages 458-481, June.
  5. John Rust & Joseph Traub & Henryk Wozniakowski, 1999. "No Curse of Dimensionality for Contraction Fixed Points Even in the Worst Case," Computational Economics 9902001, EconWPA.
  6. Jeffrey A. Miron & Stephen P. Zeldes, . "Seasonality, Cost Shocks and the Production Smoothing Model of Inventories," Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research Working Papers 01-87, Wharton School Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research.
  7. Ramey, Valerie A. & West, Kenneth D., 1999. "Inventories," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 13, pages 863-923 Elsevier.
  8. Blinder, Alan S, 1986. "More on the Speed of Adjustment in Inventory Models," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 18(3), pages 355-65, August.
  9. Jeffrey A. Miron & Stephen P. Zeldes, . "Production, Sales and the Change in Inventories: An Identity that Doesn't Add Up," Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research Working Papers 20-87, Wharton School Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research.
  10. Kahn, James A, 1992. "Why Is Production More Volatile Than Sales? Theory and Evidence on the Stockout-Avoidance Motive for Inventory-Holding," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 107(2), pages 481-510, May.
  11. Jonas D.M. Fisher & Andreas Hornstein, 1998. "(S,s) Inventory policies in general equilibrium," Working Paper 97-07, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
  12. Alan S. Blinder, 1984. "Can The Production Smoothing Model of Inventory Behavior be Saved?," NBER Working Papers 1257, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  13. Martin S. Eichenbaum, 1990. "Some Empirical Evidence on the Production Level and Production Cost Smoothing Models of Inventory Investment," NBER Working Papers 2523, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  14. Abel, Andrew B, 1985. "Inventories, Stock-Outs and Production Smoothing," Review of Economic Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 52(2), pages 283-93, April.
  15. Eichenbaum, Martin S., 1984. "Rational expectations and the smoothing properties of inventories of finished goods," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 14(1), pages 71-96, July.
  16. Kahn, James A, 1987. "Inventories and the Volatility of Production," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 77(4), pages 667-79, September.
  17. Ramey, Valerie A, 1991. "Nonconvex Costs and the Behavior of Inventories," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 99(2), pages 306-34, April.
  18. Williams,Jeffrey C. & Wright,Brian D., 1991. "Storage and Commodity Markets," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521326162.
  19. repec:att:wimass:9429 is not listed on IDEAS
  20. Caplin, Andrew S, 1985. "The Variability of Aggregate Demand with (S, s) Inventory Policies," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 53(6), pages 1395-1409, November.
  21. Martin Feldstein & Alan Auerbach, 1976. "Inventory Behavior in Durable-Goods Manufacturing: The Target-Adjustment Model," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 7(2), pages 351-408.
  22. John Rust, 1997. "Using Randomization to Break the Curse of Dimensionality," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 65(3), pages 487-516, May.
  23. Bresnahan, Timothy F & Ramey, Valerie A, 1994. "Output Fluctuations at the Plant Level," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 109(3), pages 593-624, August.
  24. John Rust, 1997. "A Comparison of Policy Iteration Methods for Solving Continuous-State, Infinite-Horizon Markovian Decision Problems Using Random, Quasi-random, and Deterministic Discretizations," Computational Economics 9704001, EconWPA.
  25. George J. Hall, 1997. "Non-Convex Costs and Capital Utilization: A Study of Production Scheduling at Automobile Assembly Plants," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1169, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
  26. Kenneth D. West, 1985. "A Variance Bounds Test of the Linear Quardractic Inventory Model," NBER Working Papers 1581, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Citations

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Cited by:
  1. George Alessandria & Joseph Kaboski & Virgiliu Midrigan, 2008. "Inventories, lumpy trade, and large devaluations," Working Paper Series WP-08-07, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
  2. Florian Zettelmeyer & Fiona Scott Morton & Jorge Silva-Risso, 2006. "Scarcity Rents in Car Retailing: Evidence from Inventory Fluctuations at Dealerships," NBER Working Papers 12177, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  3. John Rust & George Hall, 2003. "Middlemen versus Market Makers: A Theory of Competitive Exchange," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 111(2), pages 353-403, April.
  4. Aubhik Khan & Julia Thomas, 2003. "Inventories and the Business Cycle: An Equilibrium Analysis of (S,s) Policies," NBER Working Papers 10078, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  5. George Hall and John Rust, Yale University, 2001. "Econometric Methods for Endogenously Sampled Time Series: The Case of Commodity Price Speculation in the Steel Market," Computing in Economics and Finance 2001 274, Society for Computational Economics.
  6. Oleksiy Kryvtsov & Virgiliu Midrigan, 2009. "Inventories, Markups, and Real Rigidities in Menu Cost Models," Working Papers 09-6, Bank of Canada.
  7. Joao Miguel Ejarque, 2008. "Evaluating the Economic Cost of Strategic Storage of Natural Gas," Economics Discussion Papers 658, University of Essex, Department of Economics.
  8. Ejarque, João Miguel, 2011. "Evaluating the economic cost of natural gas strategic storage restrictions," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 44-55, January.
  9. Blume, Lawrence E. & Easley, David & Kleinberg, Jon & Tardos, Éva, 2009. "Trading networks with price-setting agents," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 67(1), pages 36-50, September.
  10. Jia Yan & John Liu, 2008. "Instability of Dynamic Inventory Systems," Working Papers 2008-23, School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University.

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