Costly External Finance, Corporate Investment, and the Subprime Mortgage Credit Crisis

1. Costly External Finance, Corporate Investment, and the Subprime Mortgage Credit Crisis Ran Duchin, Oguzhan Ozbas and Berk Sensoy

2. Motivation • Real effects of the financial crisis. • In particular, corporate investment. • Role of internal resources (cash) during a supply shock.

3. August, 2007

4. Motivating Figure 1:Cash

5. Motivating Figure 2: Cash and Returns

6. This Paper • Non-financial firms cut investment following the onset of the crisis. • More so when less cash on hand. • More so when financially constrained or dependent on external financing. • Some evidence of an interaction, especially between cash and external finance dependence.

7. Empirical Strategy • Differences-in-differences • Before (Q3 2006- Q2 2007) vs. after (Q3 2007 – Q2 2008). • Response as a function of cash reserves • Firm fixed effects • Control for Q, cash flow • Standard errors clustered by firm

8. Endogeneity • Cash holdings may be endogenous to investment opportunities. • Use lagged cash as an “instrument”. • Measure cash as of Q2 2006.

9. Timeline Cash Reserves 2006Q2 Subprime Mortgage Credit Crisis Before 2006Q3 – 2007Q2 After 2007Q3 – 2008Q2

10. Key Result: Investment

11. Endogeneity • What if even lagged cash proxies for susceptibility to demand shocks? • We provide direct evidence against this idea. • We also provide cross-sectional evidence based on financial constraints and external finance dependence, consistent with a supply effect.

12. Direct Evidence: Placebo Regressions

13. Placebo Conclusions • Relation between lagged cash and investment is not a general feature of the data. • It is also not a feature of the data in bad times that are mostly demand-driven.

14. Cash Reserves and Investment

15. Magnitudes • Column 1: Quarterly investment by the average firm declined by 0.104 percentage points following the onset of the crisis. • Column 2: 0.147 percentage point decline in investment for a firm with no cash reserves, and no decline for a firm holding 70.3 of assets in cash. • Average quarterly investment is 1.7% of assets, so about 10% of the pre-crisis amount.

16. Magnitudes • After x Cash coefficient is about 0.3. • Sample average Cash is 0.23, with standard deviation 0.26. • One-standard deviation increase in Cash is associated with 0.07 percentage points greater investment, almost offsetting the average decline (-0.10).

17. Cash Reserves, Financial Constraints and Investment

18. Cash Reserves, External Finance Dependence and Investment

19. Excess Cash and Investment

20. Cash Reserves and Other Investment

21. Conclusion • Corporate investment declines following the onset of the crisis. • Decline mitigated by cash reserves, including seemingly excess cash. • Decline worse for financially constrained, external finance dependent firms. • Some evidence of an interaction, especially between cash and external finance dependence.

22. Conclusion • Evidence consistent with a supply effect. • Campello, Graham, and Harvey (2009) survey corporate managers and find that they are foregoing investments because of financing constraints. • Tong and Wei (2008) find that financially constrained firms exhibit worse stock-price performance during the crisis.

23. Conclusion • Contributions are threefold. • Help understand the real effects of the crisis. • Add to the literature on financial constraints, external finance dependence and investment. • Deepen our understanding of the role of corporate cash holdings • Bright-side of seemingly excess cash.

24. Nonparametric Evidence

25. What Do We Know About Cash? • Theory • Benefits of cash • Precautionary motive (Keynes 1936) • Costs of cash • Agency (e.g., Jensen 1986) • Evidence • Precautionary cash holdings (Opler et al. 1999; Bates et al. 2008) • Agency costs of (excess) cash (Harford 1999; Dittmar and Mahrt-Smith 2007)

26. Measuring Financial Constraints • Kaplan-Zingales Index = -1.002*Cash Flow + 0.283*Q + 3.319*Debt – 39.368*Dividends – 1.315*Cash • Whited-Wu Index = -0.091*Cash Flow + 0.062*Dividend Dummy + 0.021*Long Term Debt – 0.044*Size + 0.102*Industry Sales Growth – 0.035*Sales Growth • Bond Ratings = Indicator variable equal to 1 if the firm has a bond rating

27. What Do We know About Investment And The Supply Of Capital? • Theory (Credit Rationing ) • Information Asymmetry (Jaffee and Russell (1976) , Stiglitz and Weiss (1981)) • Moral hazard (Holmstrom and Tirole (1997)) • Evidence • Investment-Cash Flow Sensitivity (e.g., Fazzari, Hubbard, and Petersen (1988), Hoshi, Kashyap, and Scharfstein (1991), Kaplan and Zingales (1997)) • Inventory (Kayshap, Lamont and Stein (1994)) • Credit supply shocks (e.g., Lemmon and Roberts (2007), Tong and Wei (2008)

28. Measuring External Finance Dependence and Information Asymmetry • Following Rajan and Zingales (1998), we compute the following industry measures: • External Finance Dependence = Proportion of capital expenditure that cannot be financed by funds from operations • External Equity Dependence = Ratio of the net amount of equity issued to capital expenditures. • Information Asymmetry = Dispersion in productivity growth (to measure idiosyncratic firm performance)

29. A Standard Model of InvestmentWith Costly External Finance • Choose I, E • When C is sufficiently high • When C is sufficiently low

30. Model (Cont.) • Effect of cash on investment • Effect of financing constraints on investment