Investment-Cash Flow Sensitivity and the Cost of External Finance

We contribute to the investment-cash ow sensitivity debate by creating a new index to identify the supply of finance to firms. We find that firms that are considered constrained according to our index pay a higher interest rate on their debt, and display the highest investment-cash fl ow sensitivities. Moreover, these findings are not driven by the possible information content of cash fl ow regarding investment opportunities as we control for oppor- tunities by augmenting our empirical model with firm-level employment growth. We thus provide new evidence consistent with Campbell et al. (2012) that the cost of capital is the driving force behind investment-cash fl ow sensitivity.