IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/chf/rpseri/rp2674.html

Chair Voice Tone, Financial Constraints, and Corporate Investment

Author

Listed:
  • Dimitrios Anastasiou

    (Athens University of Economics and Business - Department of Business Administration)

  • Thanos Andrikopoulos

    (University of Sussex Business School)

  • Apostolos G. Katsafados

    (Athens University of Economics and Business - Department of Accounting and Finance; Bank of Greece)

  • Steven Ongena

    (University of Zurich - Department Finance; Swiss Finance Institute; KU Leuven; NTNU Business School; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR))

Abstract

We examine whether the Federal Reserve Chair's vocal tone at post-Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) press conferences is associated with corporate investment and whether firm-level financing conditions moderate this relationship. Using panel local projections on quarterly data for 5,181 U.S. listed non-financial firms from 2011Q2 to 2023Q3, we document that the association between voice tone and investment varies with firms' financing conditions over time. In our preferred specification, the investment response to a more positive voice tone is 0.0414 percentage points stronger over four quarters for firms that are more constrained than their own average, and the pooled constraint index does not capture this pattern. This differential association is asymmetric. It is concentrated in unusually downbeat press conferences, after which firms that are more constrained than their average invest relatively less, while upbeat tone deviations generate little differential response. The average association between more positive voice tone and investment is modestly negative in the short run, especially in low-uncertainty quarters, and is descriptive rather than causal.

Suggested Citation

  • Dimitrios Anastasiou & Thanos Andrikopoulos & Apostolos G. Katsafados & Steven Ongena, 2026. "Chair Voice Tone, Financial Constraints, and Corporate Investment," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 26-74, Swiss Finance Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp2674
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7647938
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies
    • G31 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Capital Budgeting; Fixed Investment and Inventory Studies
    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill

    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:chf:rpseri:rp2674. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Ridima Mittal (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fameech.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.