The impact of firms’ inflation perceptions on investment: Evidence from listed manufacturing enterprises in China

Abstract

This article investigates the extent to which inflation perceptions affect firms’ innovation input and investment expenditure. We adopt dummy variables data to quantify the firm inflation perceptions of China’s listed manufacturing companies from corporate annual reports during the period from 2008–2018. Results reveal that inflation perceptions have a positive Tobin effect on investment spending decisions of the firms whose inflation perceive risen, vice versa. Besides, the investment expenditure of large manufacturing/ SOEs enterprises are more sensitive than small/non-SOEs firms when inflation perceptions have risen, and small/non-SOEs companies tend to reduce much more investment spending when inflation perceptions decline. Our results have significant implications for policymakers and firm managers.