Capital Market Imperfections, Product Market Competition andthe Cyclical Behavior of Price-Cost Markups

本研究将研究经历不同程度流动性约束的企业的定价、加价、投资和库存决策对需求波动的反应。本研究分为三个部分。在第一部分中，建立了一个模型，分析了外部融资约束对加价、资本支出和库存的影响。在这部分研究中提出的关键论点是，公司设定价格是为了吸引顾客和获得更大的市场份额。如果企业不必面对资本市场的不完善，那么加价往往是顺周期的，因为它很容易利用高客户需求的状态来提高利润率。如果公司面临资本市场的不完善，加价往往是逆周期的。当模型扩展到资本支出时，我们得出了一个一般的结果，表明借款公司如何倾向于不那么前瞻性，并且在长期内投资较少的资本。研究的第二部分利用超市行业的数据对模型进行实证应用。实证工作的主要焦点是确定那些在财务上更容易受到经济衰退影响的公司是否比财务上不那么脆弱的竞争对手更容易提高加成。研究的第三部分将基本框架扩展到更广泛的行业范围。这个项目非常有趣，因为其结果可以提高我们对资本市场和产品市场之间相互作用的理解。

9414141 Scharfstein This research will study the response of pricing, markup, investment and inventory decisions to demand fluctuations for firms experiencing different degrees of liquidity constraints. The study is divided into three parts. In the first part, a model is developed that analyzes the effects of external financing constraints on markups, capital expenditures and inventories. The key arguments made in this part of the study are that firms set prices to attract customers and capture greater market share. If firms do not have to face capital market imperfections, the markups tend to be procyclical because it is easy to capitalize on a state of high customer demand to improve profit margins. If firms face capital market imperfections, the markups tend to be countercyclical. When the model is extended to account for capital expenditures, we derive a general result that shows how borrowing firms tend to be less forward looking and invest less in capital over the long term. The second part of the study uses data from the supermarket industry in the empirical application of the models. The main focus of the empirical work is to ascertain whether firms that are more financially vulnerable to economic downturns tend to raise markups more than their less financially vulnerable rivals. The third part of the study extends the basic framework to a broader range of industries. This project is of significant interest because the results could improve our understanding of the interaction between capital markets and product markets.