理悦CEMA•知与行系列研讨会：“Upside and Downside Tails of Uncertainty, Irreversibility, and Firms’ Employment and Investment Plans: Evidence from Large Chinese Manufacturing Firms”

来源：

学校官网

收录时间：

2025-11-20 13:48:52

时间：

2025-11-25 11:30:00

地点：

中央财经大学学院南路校区学术会堂712会议室

报告人：

卢柯霖

学校：

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关键词：

uncertainty, irreversibility, employment, investment, real options, growth options, Chinese manufacturing firms

简介：

Changes in uncertainty involve changes in the upside and downside tails. We study their causal effects on firms’ employment and investment plans. We field a survey experiment with large Chinese export manufacturers. After eliciting firms' future tariffs expectations, we impose various shock scenarios in which firms' perceived probabilities of tariff hikes (downside risk) and tariff cuts (upside risk) are exogenously increased or decreased, and then we elicit firms' employment and investment plans under these scenarios. Our design decomposes uncertainty into downside and upside tails, consistent with real-option and growth-option models in which each channel loads only on a single tail. We find clear real-option effects. The higher downside risk reduces planned employment and domestic routine investment, whereas it has no impact on foreign investment. However, a lower downside risk does not affect employment, but raises both domestic routine and technological investment. Most downside risk effects are stronger when the investment has greater irreversibility. Higher upside risk, though, only has a positive impact on technological investment plans in firms with lower irreversibility, consistent with the growth-option channel. Overall, the results show that which tail of uncertainty moves, and in which direction, matters for firm behavior.

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