Conference Agenda
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 15th Sept 2026, 08:43:39am CEST
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Daily Overview |
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CF 16: Financing Frictions, Market Signals, and Corporate Investment Location: LR M1.2 (Floor 1) Session Chair: Quinn Maingi, USC Marshall | |
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ID: 1703
Capital, Intangibles, and Financial Frictions 1: Cambridge University; 2: EIEF How do financial frictions shape firms’ investment in intangible capital? We show that financial constraints distort firms’ input choices, leading to systematic underinvestment in intangible assets. Exploiting an investment subsidy in Portugal that lowered the cost of both physical and intangible capital while keeping their relative price unchanged, we find that treated firms reduced their capital-to-intangible ratio by 12 percent, with larger effects for financially constrained firms. The distribution of treatment effects declines sharply across percentiles - firms with higher initial capital-to-intangible ratios adjust the most - revealing the signature of a binding financial wedge. Going beyond average effects, we recover the entire cross-sectional distribution of wedges between the marginal rate of technical substitution and the price ratio. The recovered distribution corresponds to the least distorted economy consistent with the data, showing that only a small share of firms are unconstrained while roughly one-quarter face wedges exceeding twenty percent - providing a direct quantitative map of financial distortions in production.
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