Dynamics of Investment and Firm Performance: Comparative Evidence from Manufacturing Industries

Although the relation between investment and economic growth has been well established in the macroeconomic literature, the existence of a similar link at firm level has been challenged by empirical work. This paper investigates the channels linking investment and firm performance in the French and Italian manufacturing industries by proposing a novel methodology to identify investment spikes, which corrects for size dependence. While maintaining the desired properties of a spike measure, our chosen proxy accounts for the expected relation between investment and firm performance. Ex-ante, more efficient and fast growing firms demonstrate a higher probability to invest; in turn, following an investment spike, the group of investing firms shows further performance gains. We show also that expansionary investment episodes, proxied by the opening of new plants, have a negative effect on profitability but are associated with higher sales and higher levels of employment.