Investment-Cash Flow Sensitivity – A Focus on the Panel-Data Econometrics Involved

Philip Schnorpfeil, WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management (Masterarbeit)
Junior Management Science 2(1), 2017, 17-48

I revisit Fazzari (1988) seminal paper on the investment-cash flow sensitivity as a measure of financing constraints and augment their approach with the findings from recent papers. I find that the investment-cash flow sensitivity has decreased and mostly disappeared over time, in line with recent literature. This finding is robust to alternative specifications and a number of robustness checks. I contribute to the literature by explicitly analyzing the strict-exogeneity assumption of the fixed-effects and first-differences estimators in empirical practice. In this setting, strict exogeneity does not hold and the violation can cause substantial inconsistencies.

Keywords: Investment-cash flow sensitivity, Capital market imperfections, Strict exogeneity, Panel data