The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 107 No. 6 2025
Financial Constraints, Sectoral Heterogeneity, and the Cyclicality of Investment
Abstract
While investment in most sectors declines in response to a contractionary monetary policy shock, investment in the manufacturing sector increases. Using manually digitized aggregate income and balance sheet data for the universe of US manufacturing firms, I show that this increase is driven by the types of firms which are least likely to be financially constrained. A two-sector New Keynesian model with financial frictions can match these facts; unconstrained firms take advantage of the decline in the user cost of capital caused by the monetary contraction, while constrained firms are forced to cut back. Removing firm financial constraints in the model dampens the response of manufacturing output to monetary shocks by about 25%.
- DOI
- 10.1162/rest_a_01351
- Volume
- 107
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1603-1619
- Language
- en
- Sources
- openalex crossref