Investment adjustment costs: evidence from UK and US industries

Charlotta Groth () and Hashmat Khan ()

Bank of England working papers from Bank of England

Abstract: In aggregate models, costs that penalise changes in investment - investment adjustment costs - have been introduced to help account for a variety of business cycle and asset market phenomena. In this paper, we evaluate empirical evidence for these types of costs using US and UK industry data. We consider a general adjustment cost structure which nests both investment adjustment costs and the traditional capital adjustment costs as special cases. The estimated weight on the former is close to zero for all the industries. When only the investment adjustment cost structure is considered, the estimates of the adjustment cost parameter are small relative to those based on aggregate data, and imply an elasticity of investment with respect to the shadow price of capital (the value to the firm of one additional unit of capital) fifteen times larger than that found in aggregate studies. Our results suggest that from a disaggregated empirical perspective it remains difficult to motivate and interpret the investment friction considered in recent macroeconomic models.

Date: 2007-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/workingpapers/2007/WP332.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/workingpapers/2007/WP332.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/workingpapers/2007/WP332.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:332

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 ().