Finance Constraints and Inventory Investment: Empirical Tests with Panel Data

The author empirically tests two aspects of the interaction between financial variables and inventory investment: negative cash flow and finance constraints due to asymmetric information. This is one of the first studies of inventory investment and finance constraints using Canadian data. A sample of Canadian manufacturing firms over the period 1992Q2-1999Q4 is split into subsamples based on age, bond rating, and size to reflect expected differences in degrees of asymmetric information problems. The findings are consistent with a model in which inventory investment is a U-shaped function of cash flow. Higher degrees of information asymmetry do not appear to generate differences in the sensitivity of inventory investment to cash flow during the sample period.