On the German Monetary Transmission Mechanism: Interest Rate and Credit Channels for Investment Spending
Abstract
The transmission channels through which monetary policy affects business investment remain opaque. This paper examines the importance of the interest rate and credit channels on business fixed investment in Germany. We have at our disposal three uniquely rich datasets -- a panel of financial statement data for 6,408 firms (44,345 datapoints) supplemented with user costs of capital and confidential measures of creditworthiness. We uncover a statistically significant interest rate channel. Its economic significance can be sizeable, but depends on auxiliary assumptions. Sorting firms with our direct measure of creditworthiness, we find that credit constraints are important for a subset of firms. Sortings by firm size or dividend payout ratios shed some light on continuing debates in the literature.Download Info
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Paper provided by CESifo Group Munich in its series CESifo Working Paper Series with number 838.Length:
Date of creation: 2003
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Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_838
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Keywords:Find related papers by JEL classification:
- E22 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Capital; Investment; Capacity
- E50 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - General
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2004-05-02 (All new papers)
- NEP-MON-2004-05-02 (Monetary Economics)
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Ulf von Kalckreuth & Emma Murphy, 2005.
"Financial constraints and capacity adjustment in the United Kingdom: evidence from a large panel of survey data,"
Bank of England working papers
260, Bank of England.
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