A recent paper in this Journal by Kaplan and Zingales reexamines a subset of firms from work of Fazzari, Hubbard, and Petersen and criticizes the usefulness of investment-cash flow sensitivities for detecting financing constraints. We show that the Kaplan and Zingales theoretical model fails to capture the approach employed in the literature and thus does not provide an effective critique. Moreover, we describe why their empirical classification system is flawed in identifYing both whether firms are constrained and the relative degree of constraints across firm groups. We conclude that their results do not support their conclusions about the usefulness of investment-cash flow sensitivities.
近期Kaplan和Zingales在本期刊发表的一篇论文重新审视了Fazzari、Hubbard和Petersen的研究中一部分公司的数据,并批评了投资-现
金流敏感性在检测融资约束中的实用性。我们表明,Kaplan和Zingales的理论模型未能捕捉文献中采用的方法,因此并没有提供有效的批评。此外,我们还解释了他们的实证分类系统在识别公司是否受限及各公司组别的相对约束程度方面的缺陷。我们得出结论,他们的结果并不支持他们关于投资-现
金流敏感性实用性的结论。