Investment and Sales: Some Empirical Evidence

Andrew Abel and Olivier Blanchard

No 2050, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper attempts to give a structural interpretation to the distributed lag of sales on investment at the two-digit level in US manufacturing. It first presents a simple model which captures the various sources of lags and their respective implications. It then estimates the model, using both data on investment and sales as well as direct evidence on the sources of lags. The spirit of the paper is exploratory ; the model is used mainly as a vehicle to construct, present and interpret the data. We find that the following model can roughly generate the distributed lag structure found in the data. Firms face delivery lags of 3 quarters. They also face adjustment costs, which lead them to take into account expected future sales, with discount factor -9 when constructing the desired capital stock, and to close about 5% of the gap between actual and desired capital per quarter. They pay for orders at a constant rate between the time of order and that of delivery. The model is however not very successful in explaining differences in dynamics across sectors.

Date: 1986-10
Note: EFG
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Published as From Dynamic Econometric Modeling: Proceedings of the Third International Symposium in Economic Theory & Econometrics, edited by William A. Barnett, Ernst Berndt, and Halbert White, pp. 269-296. New York: Cambridge Univ-ersity Press, 1988.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w2050.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Investment and Sales; Some Empirical Evidence (1986)
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:2050

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w2050

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 ().