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Working Paper Series no. 97: Firm Investment and Monetary Policy Transmission in the Euro Area (en anglais)

Abstract

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest euro-area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we explore what can be learned about the interest channel and the broad credit channel. For each of those countries, we estimate neo-classical investment relationships, explaining investment by its user cost, sales and cash flow. We find investment to be sensitive to user cost changes in all those four countries. This implies an operative interest channel in these euro-area countries. We also find in-vestment in all countries to be quite sensitive to cash flow movements. However, only in Italy do smaller firms react more to cash flow movements than large firms, implying that a broad credit channel might not be equally pervasive in all countries.

Jean-Bernard Chatelain, Andrea Generale, Ignacio Hernando, Ulf von Kalckreuth and Philip Vermeulen
December 2002

Classification JEL : E22, E50.

Keywords : investment, monetary transmission channels, user cost of capital.

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Working Paper Series no. 97: Firm Investment and Monetary Policy Transmission in the Euro Area (en anglais)
  • Published on 12/01/2002
  • EN
  • PDF (261.5 KB)
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Updated on: 04/19/2019 09:27