The interrelationship between financial constraints and firm activity is a hotly debated issue. The way firms cope with financial constraints is fundamental to the analysis of monetary transmission, of financial stability and of growth and development. The CBI Industrial Trends Survey contains...

The impact of uncertainty on firms' investment outlays is subject to an ongoing debate. Theory identifies several channels. Irreversibility, financing constraints and risk aversion make a negative relationship between uncertainty and investment likely. On the other hand, the ability of firms to...

In order to obtain a better understanding of monetary transmission, this paper assesses the importance of the interest rate and credit channels on business fixed investment in the German manufacturing sector. Our panel of financial statements contains 44,345 observations for 6,408 firms. We...

Understanding adjustment processes has become central in economics. Empirical analysis is fraught with the problem that the target is usually unobserved. This paper develops, simulates and applies GMM methods for estimating dynamic adjustment models in a panel data context with partially...

Following a positive shock, financing constraints will prolong or impede economic expansion that would have been optimal in an unconstrained environment. The study of dynamic adjustment therefore offers a direct way of verifying the presence of financing constraints and assessing their...

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest euro-area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we explore...

This paper evaluates the consequences of accelerated technical progress for monetary transmission and the speed of adjustment in the real economy. With a decreasing service life, the long term rate relevant to real demand will resemble more closely the money market rate. We make the investment...

The interpretation of the significant relation between business investment spending and cash flow has been controversial. A large body of research has found that investment/cash flow sensitivities are higher for financially constrained firms. This fundamental result underlying the finance...

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the effects of monetary policy on business investment. Important ambiguities with the modeling of investment dynamics and interactions between real and financial decisions suggest modeling investment spending as a VAR. Based on a panel of...