Do Firms Mitigate or Magnify Capital Misallocation? Evidence from Planet-Level Data

No 6401, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Almost two thirds of the cross-plant dispersion in marginal revenue products of capital occurs across plants within the same firm rather than between firms. Even though firms allocate invest- ment very differently across their plants, they do not equalize marginal revenue products across their plants. We reconcile these findings in a model of multi-plant firms, physical adjustment costs and credit constraints. Credit constrained multi-plant firms can utilize internal capital markets by concentrating internal funds on investment projects in only a few of their plants in a given period and rotating funds to another set of plants in the future. The resulting increase in within-firm dispersion of marginal revenue products of capital is hence not a symptom of misallocation within the firm, but rather actions taken by the firm to mitigate external credit constraints and adjustment costs of capital. Economies with multi-plant firms produce more aggregate output despite higher dispersion in marginal revenue products of capital compared to economies with single-plant firms. Because emerging economies are predominantly populated by single-plant firms, the gains from reducing their distortions to the level of developed are larger than previously thought.

Keywords: misallocation; productivity dispersion; multi-plants firms; internal capital markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E20 G30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6401.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Firms Mitigate or Magnify Capital Misallocation? Evidence from Plant-Level Data (2018)
Working Paper: Do Firms Mitigate or Magnify Capital Misallocation? Evidence from Plant-Level Data (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6401

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().