Macroeconomic uncertainty and cost stickiness

Abstract

Cost management is the core issue related to the development of enterprises, and studying enterprise cost behavior will contribute to optimizing enterprise decisions. However, an enterprise is not an independent organization. Instead, it exists and is affected by the macroeconomic environment. So it is conducive for company to apply macroenvironment information to cost management behaviors. This paper studies the cost stickiness based on the perspective of macroeconomic uncertainty, and takes “adjustment cost” and “agency problems” as the internal logic to integrate into the existing interpretation framework of cost stickiness. We analyze SG&A costs for Chinese listed firms over the period 2013 – 2019 after controlling for known economic determinants. The results show a positive relation between the macroeconomic uncertainty and the degree of cost asymmetry. In particular, the macroeconomic uncertainty makes the cost stickiness of human resource cost weaken.