Do Financing Constraints Explain Why Investment is Correlated with Cash Flow?
) and Luigi Zingales No 5267, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc Abstract: This paper investigates the sources of the correlation between corporate cash flow and investment by undertaking an in-depth analysis of the 49 low-dividend firms identified by Fazzari, Hubbard, and Petersen (1988) as having an unusually high investment-cash flow sensitivity. We find that in only 15% of firm-years is there some question as to a firm’s ability to access internal or external funds to increase investment. Strikingly, those firms that appear less financially constrained exhibit a significantly greater investment- cash flow sensitivity than firms that appear more financially constrained. We find this pattern for the entire sample period, for sub-periods, and for individual years. The results indicate that a higher sensitivity cannot be interpreted as evidence that a firm is more financially constrained. We discuss reasons and provide evidence why the opposite may be tr
