Monetary Policy and Corporate Investment: Evidence from Chinese Micro Data

This paper investigates how a firm's characteristics restrict the influence of monetary policy changes on its investment behavior. Focusing on China's listed companies for a sample period from the first quarter of 2002 to the first quarter of 2011, we find that quantity-oriented and price-based monetary policies have heterogeneous impacts on corporate investment behavior, but the influence of monetary policies is constrained by the liquidity, inventory, size and assetliability ratio of a firm. Firms with higher liquidity, lower inventory level and lower assetliability ratios are less sensitive to the impact from two kinds of monetary policies. The larger the size of the firm, the less it is subject to influence from quantity-oriented monetary policy; it responds more to price-based monetary policy. The policy implication is that the monetary authorities should pay attention to the importance of policy-making based on the monetary demand of microeconomic entities.