Inventory investment and cash flow

Ian Small

Bank of England working papers from Bank of England

Abstract: 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 Meghir (1994) based on the firm's financial policy. The main finding is that the effect of cash flow on inventory investment is concentrated among firms identified as financially constrained using either their financial policy or a criterion based on their current ratio. This suggests that there is no unique criterion for identifying financially constrained firms using financial information in company accounts. Contrary to what previous studies have found, using firm size or the coverage ratio to define financially constrained firms does not reduce the effect of cash flow on the inventory investment of unconstrained firms. This raises doubts about whether these are accurate indicators of whether a firm is financially constrained. Combined with Bond and Meghir's similar findings for fixed investment, the results in this paper suggest that cash flow effects form part of the monetary transmission mechanism.

Date: 2000-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mfd
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/archive/Documents/h ... apers/2000/wp112.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/archive/Documents/historicpubs/workingpapers/2000/wp112.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/archive/Documents/historicpubs/workingpapers/2000/wp112.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boe:boeewp:112

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bank of England working papers from Bank of England Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, London, EC2R 8AH. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Digital Media Team ().