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Investment Frictions and the Aggregate Output Loss in China

Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics

Published online on

Abstract

Investment frictions reduce, delay or protract investment expenditure that is necessary for firms to capture growth opportunities. Using a capital adjustment costs framework, this article estimates the gap between China's actual and frictionless aggregate output. It applies the method of simulated moments to a fully structural investment model on a panel of Chinese firms and takes into account potential unobserved heterogeneities and measurement error in the data. The estimated capital adjustment costs imply that if Chinese firms had faced a lower level of adjustment costs such as in the US, China's aggregate output would be 25% higher.