Investment and Finance when Liquidation is Costly

In this paper we investigate to what extent expected liquidation costs affect the dependence of a firm's investment decision on available finance. We hypothesise that comovement of firm and industry sales measures such costs, which create a premium on external finance and make investment more sensitive to the availability of internal funds. Supportive evidence for this conjecture is obtained from the investment behaviour of a sample of 206 large Dutch manufacturing firms observed during the period 1983-1996. We also demonstrate that our measure of expected liquidation costs has additional explanatory power over other proxies for the premium on external finance like leverage, retention practice and firm size.