What Drives Aggregate Investment? Evidence from German Survey Data

Ruediger Bachmann and Peter Zorn (peter.zorn@econ.lmu.de)

No 18990, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The ifo Investment Survey asks firms in the German manufacturing sector about the importance of sales, technological factors, finance, return expectations, and macroeconomic policy for their investment activity in a given year. We show that these subjective investment determinants 1) capture economically what their labels suggest, and 2) have strong explanatory power for aggregate manufacturing investment growth fluctuations. In a second step, we use these determinants to identify aggregate demand and aggregate technology shocks and argue that the bulk of the variance of both aggregate manufacturing investment and output growth fluctuations (as much as approximately two thirds in both cases) is explained by aggregate demand shocks. Consistent with neoclassical views, however, technological factors are the most important investment determinant on average.

JEL-codes: E20 E22 E30 E32 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
Note: EFG ME
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Rüdiger Bachmann & Peter Zorn, 2020. "What Drives Aggregate Investment? Evidence from German Survey Data," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18990.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: What drives aggregate investment? Evidence from German survey data (2020)
Working Paper: What drives aggregate investment? Evidence from German survey data (2020)
Working Paper: What Drives Aggregate Investment? Evidence from German Survey Data (2018)
Working Paper: What Drives Aggregate Investment? Evidence from German Survey Data (2013)
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:nbr:nberwo:18990

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18990

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).