Investment and time to plan and build: A comparison of structures vs. equipment in a panel of Italian firms

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Del Boca, Alessandra; Galeotti, Marzio; Himmelberg, Charles P.; Rota, Paola
• 署名单位: University of Brescia; University of Milan
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1162/JEEA.2008.6.4.864
• 发表日期: 2008
• 页码: 864-889
• 关键词: to-build; aggregate fluctuations; delivery lags; capital goods; models; persistence; demand

摘要

Time-to-build models of investment expenditures play an important role in many traditional and modem theories of the business cycle, especially for explaining the dynamic propagation of shocks. We estimate the structural parameters of a time-to-build model using annual firm-level investment data on equipment and structures. For expenditures on equipment, we find no evidence of time-to-build effects beyond one year. For expenditures on structures, by contrast, there is clear evidence of such effects in the range of two to three years. The contrast between equipment and structures is intuitively reasonable and consistent with previous results. The estimates for structures also indicate that initial-period expenditures are low and increase as projects near completion. These results provide empirical support for including time-to-plan effects for investment in structures. More generally, these results suggest a potential source of specification error for Q models of investment and production-based asset pricing models that ignore the time required to plan, build, and install new capital.