Firms’ investment decisions in response to demand and price uncertainty
Abstract
We estimate the effect of demand and price uncertainty on firms’ investment decisions from a panel of manufacturing firms. Uncertainty measures are derived from firms’ subjective qualitative expectations. They are close to their theoretical counterparts, the variances of future demand and price shocks. We find that demand uncertainty depresses planned and realized investment, while price uncertainty is insignificant. This is consistent with the behavior of monopolistic firms with irreversible capital Caballero, 1991). Further, firms revise their investment plans very little. They may do so in response to new information on sales growth, but not as a result of reduced uncertainty.Download Info
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Paper provided by European Central Bank in its series Working Paper Series with number 347.Length: 35 pages
Date of creation: Apr 2004
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Handle: RePEc:ecb:ecbwps:20040347
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Related research
Keywords: investment; uncertainty; real options; survey data; panel data.;Other versions of this item:
- Catherine Fuss & Philip Vermeulen, 2008. "Firms' investment decisions in response to demand and price uncertainty," Applied Economics, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 40(18), pages 2337-2351.
- Catherine Fuss & Philip Vermeulen, 2004. "Firms' investment decisions in response to demand and price uncertainty," Working Paper Research 45, National Bank of Belgium.
- D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Theory
- D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity
- D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
- D92 - Microeconomics - - Intertemporal Choice and Growth - - - Intertemporal Firm Choice and Growth, Financing, Investment, and Capacity
- C23 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Models with Panel Data; Longitudinal Data; Spatial Time Series
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2005-10-04 (All new papers)
- NEP-MIC-2005-10-04 (Microeconomics)
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