Finance Seminar with Kerry Siani
The Department of Finance is proud to announce the upcoming seminar with Kerry Siani from MIT Sloan School of Management
Seminar Details
Please join us for a Finance Seminar with Kerry Siani, MIT Sloan School of Management.
Kerry Siani will present: Monetary Policy and Investment Plans
Abstract: We explore how monetary policy affects corporate investment decisions, and why there are long and variable lags in transmission. To do so, we hand-collect a firm-level dataset of U.S. investment plans and link it to managers’ cash-flow expectations. Plans strongly predict realized investment, and allow us to observe decision changes separately from implementation. Using high-frequency monetary policy surprises, we show that firms revise investment plans in response to monetary policy, but the response varies by horizon: long-horizon plans are much more sensitive to policy than near-term plans. Consistent with theories of capital production frictions, plans for new projects respond more to monetary policy than plans related to ongoing projects. These results help to explain the long and variable lags in monetary policy transmission. Regarding transmission mechanisms, we document evidence of a cost of capital channel. Cash flow expectations respond to policy but explain a small fraction of investment-plan adjustments for firms in our sample.