IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedrer/y1992ijanp3-12nv.78no.1.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Evidence of improved inventory control

Author

Listed:
  • Dan M. Bechter
  • Stephen Stanley

Abstract

Inventory data applied to a standard partial stock-adjustment model demonstrate that inventory control, defined by desired marginal inventory-sales ratios and speeds of adjustment, improved in the last decade or so, particularly in the manufacturing sector. In addition, the evidence suggests that, contrary to popular wisdom, the net effect of these changes in inventory control has been to increase the volatility of inventory investment in both the manufacturing and trade sectors.

Suggested Citation

  • Dan M. Bechter & Stephen Stanley, 1992. "Evidence of improved inventory control," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, vol. 78(Jan), pages 3-12.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedrer:y:1992:i:jan:p:3-12:n:v.78no.1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/economic-quarterly-federal-reserve-bank-richmond-960/january-february-1992-477370?page=1
    File Function: Full Text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Blinder, Alan S & Maccini, Louis J, 1991. "The Resurgence of Inventory Research: What Have We Learned?," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 5(4), pages 291-328.
    2. Stephen L. Able & Dan M. Bechter, 1979. "Inventory recession ahead?," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, vol. 64(Jul), pages 7-19.
    3. Irvine, F Owen, Jr, 1981. "Retail Inventory Investment and the Cost of Capital," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(4), pages 633-648, September.
    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. Marwan Chacra & Maral Kichian, 2004. "A Forecasting Model for Inventory Investments in Canada," Staff Working Papers 04-39, Bank of Canada.
    2. Irvine, F. Owen, 2003. "Long term trends in US inventory to sales ratios," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 81(1), pages 27-39, January.
    3. Joel H. Steckel & Sunil Gupta & Anirvan Banerji, 2004. "Supply Chain Decision Making: Will Shorter Cycle Times and Shared Point-of-Sale Information Necessarily Help?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 50(4), pages 458-464, April.
    4. Irvine, F. Owen, 2003. "Problems with using traditional aggregate inventory to sales ratios," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 81(1), pages 41-50, January.

    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. Baron, Opher & Callen, Jeffrey L. & Segal, Dan, 2023. "Does the bullwhip matter economically? A cross-sectional firm-level analysis," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 259(C).
    2. Raddatz, Claudio, 2006. "Liquidity needs and vulnerability to financial underdevelopment," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 80(3), pages 677-722, June.
    3. Robert E. Carpenter & Steven M. Fazzari & Bruce C. Petersen, 1994. "Inventory (Dis)Investment, Internal Finance Fluctuations, and the Business Cycle," Macroeconomics 9401001, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Bustos, Emil, 2023. "The Effect of Financial Constraints on Inventory Holdings," Working Paper Series 1463, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
    5. Afrifa, Godfred & Tingbani, Ishmael, 2017. "Working Capital Management, Cash Flow and SMEs’ Performance," MPRA Paper 82894, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised Oct 2017.
    6. Galeotti, Marzio & Maccini, Louis J. & Schiantarelli, Fabio, 2005. "Inventories, employment and hours," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(3), pages 575-600, April.
    7. Alessandro Ferrari, 2022. "Inventories, Demand Shocks Propagation and Amplification in Supply Chains," Papers 2205.03862, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2025.
    8. Małgotrzata B. Okręglicka, 2014. "The Economic Recession And Working Capital Management Of Companies In Poland," Economy & Business Journal, International Scientific Publications, Bulgaria, vol. 8(1), pages 696-706.
    9. Caglayan, Mustafa & Maioli, Sara & Mateut, Simona, 2012. "Inventories, sales uncertainty, and financial strength," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(9), pages 2512-2521.
    10. Han Hu & Shihui Yang & Lin Zeng & Xuesi Zhang, 2024. "U.S.–China trade conflicts and R&D investment: evidence from the BIS entity lists," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(1), pages 1-15, December.
    11. Chen, Zhengyang, 2019. "The Long-term Rate and Interest Rate Volatility in Monetary Policy Transmission," EconStor Preprints 204579, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    12. Tarek Ibrahim Eldomiaty & Mohamed Hashem Rashwan & Mohamed Bahaa El Din & Waleed Tayel, 2016. "Firm, industry and economic determinants of working capital at risk," International Journal of Financial Engineering (IJFE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 3(04), pages 1-29, December.
    13. Durlauf, Steven N. & Maccini, Louis J., 1995. "Measuring noise in inventory models," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 65-89, August.
    14. Hoang-Lan Le & Kieu-Trang Vu & Thi-Bich-Ngoc Le & Ngoc-Khanh Du & Manh Dung Tran, 2018. "Impact of Working Capital Management on Financial Performance: The case of Vietnam," International Journal of Applied Economics, Finance and Accounting, Online Academic Press, vol. 3(1), pages 15-20.
    15. Fiorito, Riccardo, 2003. "Inventory changes and the closing of macroeconometric models," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 81(1), pages 75-84, January.
    16. Miron, Jeffrey A & Zeldes, Stephen P, 1988. "Seasonality, Cost Shocks, and the Production Smoothing Models of Inventories," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 56(4), pages 877-908, July.
    17. He, Xin & Xu, Xinwei & Shen, Yu, 2023. "How climate change affects enterprise inventory management —— From the perspective of regional traffic," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 162(C).
    18. Donald S. Allen, 1996. "Aggregate dynamics of lumpy agents," Working Papers 1996-003, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    19. Adam Copeland & George Hall, 2011. "The response of prices, sales, and output to temporary changes in demand," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 26(2), pages 232-269, March.
    20. Bai, Tian & Feng, Gengzhong & Wu, Meng & Zhu, Stuart X., 2025. "A newsvendor model with multiple reference points: Target-setting for aspirational newsvendors," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 320(3), pages 655-669.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Inventories;

    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:fedrer:y:1992:i:jan:p:3-12:n:v.78no.1. 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: Christian Pascasio (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbrius.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.