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Titre Imperfections du marché du crédit, investissement des entreprises et cycle économique
Auteur Benoît Cœuré, Laurence Bloch
Mir@bel Revue Economie et prévision
Numéro no 120, 1995/4
Rubrique / Thématique
Décrire et comprendre le cycle économique
Page 161-185
Résumé anglais Credit Market Imperfections, Corporate Investment and the Business Cycle by Laurence Bloch and Benoît Cœuré In the 1980s, a vast body of literature resurrected the idea that financial constraints and, more generally, the credit creation process could have significant effects on firms' behaviour and the propagation of business fluctuations. From a microeconomic standpoint, this literature highlighted asymmetric information between lenders and borrowers as well as transversal differences in the firms' access to the credit market. At a macroeconomic level, this prompts an amplification of the business cycle by financial factors, called the financial accelerator mechanism. Our aim is to assess the relevance of this thesis to French data, with particular attention to the last business cycle. First, we use individual data to examine the transversal implications of the theory by sorting firms according to their relative access to credit. We observe that firms more likely to be credit-constrained reduced their investment more during the recession: their bank credit decreased more sharply and was not offset by an increased use of other external financing. Secondly, we test for restrictions in the Euler equation of the firm's intertemporal investment programme on aggregate time-series data. Although the hypothesis of no financial constraint is rejected by the data, the key feature of the financial accelerator in the form of the asymmetric effect of the constraint by cycle phase is not accepted.
Source : Éditeur (via Persée)
Article en ligne http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/ecop_0249-4744_1995_num_120_4_5750