Do Investment-Cash Flow Sensitivities Provide Useful Measures of Financing Constraints?
通过分析Fazzari等人识别的高投资-现金流敏感性公司，发现融资约束较小的公司反而表现出更高的敏感性，质疑了用该指标衡量融资约束的有效性。
No. This paper investigates the relationship between financing constraints and investment-cash flow sensitivities by analyzing the firms identified by Fazzari, Hubbard, and Petersen as having unusually high investment-cash flow sensitivities. We find that firms that appear less financially constrained exhibit significantly greater sensitivities than firms that appear more financially constrained. We find this pattern for the entire sample period, subperiods, and individual years. These results (and simple theoretical arguments) suggest that higher sensitivities cannot be interpreted as evidence that firms are more financially constrained. These findings call into question the interpretation of most previous research that uses this methodology.