The relationship between inventory investment and the real interest rate has been difficult to assess empirically. Recent work has proposed a linear-quadratic inventory model with time-varying discount factor to identify the effects of the real interest rate on inventory investment. The authors...

Staggered nominal price setting introduces predictable sales variations at the firm level. We study the implications of staggered prices in a framework where, because of increasing marginal cost, firms use inventories to smooth production and thereby separate sales from production. Conventional...

The importance of inventory investment in the business cycle is well known. Its role in the seasonal cycle is less well known. We examine the variation of inventory investment and its comovement with output over the seasonal and business cycles. We measure the deterministic and stochastic...

This paper uses a panel of UK manufacturing firms to examine whether the effect of cash flow on inventory investment reflects the presence of financially constrained firms. Financially constrained firms are identified using a number of criteria, including the criterion suggested by Bond and...

What role does labor play in firms' market value? We explore this question using a production-based asset pricing model with frictions in the adjustment of both capital and labor. We posit that hiring of labor is akin to investment in capital and that the two interact, with the interaction being...

We study the implications of a stockout constraint in a dynamic general equilibrium model, which can explain both RBC and inventory facts well. Under the stockout constraint, inventories and demand are complements in generating sales, and hence the optimal level of inventories increases in...