Hayashi meets Kiyotaki and Moore: a theory of capital adjustment costs

Pengfei Wang and Yi Wen

No 2010-037, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Abstract: Firm-level investment is lumpy and volatile but aggregate investment is much smoother and highly serially correlated. These different patterns of investment behavior have been viewed as indicating convex adjustment costs at the aggregate level but non-convex adjustment costs at the firm level. This paper shows that financial frictions in the form of collateralized borrowing at the firm level (Kiyotaki and Moore, 1997) can give rise to convex adjustment costs at the aggregate level yet at the same time generate lumpiness in plant-level investment. In particular, our model can (i) derive aggregate capital adjustment cost functions identical to those assumed by Hayashi (1982) and (ii) explain the weak empirical relationship between Tobin?s Q and plant-level investment. Although aggregate adjustment cost functions can be derived from microfoundations, they are subject to the Lucas critique because parameters in such functions may not be structural and policy invariant.

Keywords: Capital investments; Tobin's q (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-dge and nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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DOI: 10.20955/wp.2010.037

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