What drives business investment in the United Kingdom? Results from a firm-level VAR approach

Marko Melolinna ()
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Marko Melolinna: Bank of England, Postal: Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, London, EC2R 8AH

No 646, Bank of England working papers from Bank of England

Abstract: This paper studies the effects of macroeconomic shocks on business investment in the United Kingdom by filtering a large UK firm-level based dataset of financial accounts into macro-level proxy indicators, and then using these indicators in a Bayesian vector autoregression framework to analyse these effects. The analysis combines micro-level data with macro-level analysis in a unique way, and brings up several interesting empirical results. Supply shocks have tended to have been more persistent and more important than demand shocks in explaining UK investment dynamics over the past fifteen years, and their importance appears to have increased since the financial crisis. Furthermore, shocks to the cost of capital, and uncertainties related to it, have generally been more important for firms in sectors with higher indebtedness, whereas corporate governance issues as measured by dividend payments and share buybacks do not appear to have been a major driver of investment.

Keywords: Business cycle; micro data; vector autoregression; sign restrictions; time-varying parameters (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 C32 D21 E32 E52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2017-02-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boe:boeewp:0646

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