On the Nature of Capital Adjustment Costs

Abstract

This paper studies the nature of capital adjustment at the plant level. We use an indirect inference procedure to estimate the structural parameters of a rich specification of capital adjustment costs. In effect, the parameters are optimally chosen to reproduce a set of moments that capture the non-linear relationship between investment and profitability found in plant-level data. Our findings indicate that a model, which mixes both convex and non-convex adjustment costs, fits the data best.