We identify total factor productivity (TFP) news shocks using standard VAR methodology and document a new stylized fact: in response to news about future increases in TFP, inventories rise and comove positively with other major macroeconomic aggregates. We show that the standard theoretical...

A critical assumption in the vast literature on inventory management has been that the current level of inventory is known to the decision maker. Some of the most celebrated results such as the optimality of base-stock policies have been obtained under this assumption. Yet it is often the case...

This entry is a brief survey of classical inventory models and their extensions in several directions such as world-driven demands, presence of forecast updates, multi-delivery modes and advanced demand information, incomplete inventory information, and decentralized inventory control in the...

Inventory availability has been widely recognized as an important leverage to enhance the competitive edge of a firm. We study the competition between two retailers who compete on both price and inventory availability. Competition on inventory availability may have important implications on...

We develop a directed search model where buyers purchase goods produced by sellers through intermediaries. The presence of search frictions creates demand uncertainty and makes instantaneous replenishment impossible. To avoid the risk of stockout, an intermediary holds inventory. The...

Sourcing internationally entails additional costs due to larger per inventory holdings. When firms switch toward foreign sources, these unobserved costs increase. This paper revisits the effect of trade liberalization on firms' productivity taking into account the inventory premium of importing...

The literature suggests that the presence of a labor union poses operational risk for firms by reducing operating flexibility. We posit that managers stockpile inventory in response to their heightened operational risk, such as potential strikes, so that managers maintain bargaining power in...

This paper investigates how supply chain management (SCM) efficiency affects the value investors attach to the change in a company's inventory holdings. Based on a large number of U.S. firms from 1971 to 2013, we find that, on average, one dollar of inventory change is valued at $0.507 in the...

The central issue in supply chain management is to match supply with demand, and the heart of a planning model is the modeling of supply and demand functions. To allow for analytical tractability, the existing literature often assumes almost surely linear supply and demand functions, which...

Financially constrained firms hold more inventory than do financially unconstrained firms and also show more volatility in inventory holdings. To understand why, we model the interaction of financial constraints, capacity constraints, and the response of production and inventory to cost and...

We examine the role that spot markets and physical inventories play in revealing to uninformed traders the expectations of informed traders. Although many papers investigate potential mechanisms by which futures markets may disseminate such information, the role of spot markets has not been...

This paper examines how managerial short-termism can affect a firm's inventory decision when external investors have only partial information about the firm's demand uncertainty. We first study the scenario where the manager's short-termism is exogenously given. We derive the full equilibrium...

This paper derives the transaction demand for inventory equations so as to investigate whether transactions inventory balances vary proportionately or less than in proportion to changes in the volume of sales. It also investigates the effect of capital costs on inventory holdings of the...

Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo...

In this paper we introduce a new two-factor commodity term structure model for which inventories serve as a second state variable. We derive a closed-form formula for futures prices and empirically analyze the model's properties. Besides being economically appealing, our model also outperforms...

This paper explores the existence of a bounce-back effect in inventory investment using the European Commission opinion survey on stocks of finished products in manufacturing and retail trade sectors. The data are quarterly balance for France, Germany and a European aggregate, from 1985q1 to...

Time-to-build, time-to-produce, and inventory have important implications for asset prices and quantity dynamics in a general equilibrium model with recursive preferences. Time-to-build captures the delay in transforming new investments into productive capital, and time-to-produce captures the...

We offer a new explanation as to why international trade is so volatile in response to economic shocks. Our approach combines the uncertainty shock idea of Bloom (2009) with a model of international trade, extending the idea to the open economy. Firms import intermediate inputs from home or...

We offer a new explanation as to why international trade is so volatile in response to economic shocks. Our approach combines the uncertainty shock idea of Bloom (2009) with a model of international trade, extending the idea to the open economy. Firms import intermediate inputs from home or...