The Effect of Uncertainty on Investment, Hiring, and R&D: Causal Evidence from Equity Options

42 Pages Posted: 26 Jul 2010 Last revised: 21 Jun 2014

Date Written: October 4, 2013

Abstract

There is wide debate over the impact of uncertainty on firm behavior, due to the difficulty both of measuring uncertainty and of identifying causality. This paper takes three steps that attempt to address these challenges. First, we develop an instrumental variables strategy that exploits firms’ differential exposure to energy and currency prices and volatility. For example, airlines are negatively affected by high oil prices while oil refiners benefit from them, but both are sensitive to oil price volatility; retailers, in comparison, are not particularly sensitive to either the level or volatility of oil prices. Second, we use the expected volatility of stock prices as implied by equity options to obtain forward-looking measures of uncertainty over firms’ business conditions. Finally, we examine how uncertainty affects a range of outcomes: capital investment, hiring, research and development, and advertising. We find that uncertainty depresses capital investment, hiring, and advertising, but encourages R&D spending. This perhaps-surprising result for R&D is consistent with a theoretical literature emphasizing that long investment lags create valuable real put options which offset the effects of call options lost when projects are started. Aggregating across our panel of Compustat firms, we find that rising uncertainty accounts for roughly a third of the fall in capital investment and hiring that occurred in 2008-10.

JEL Classification: E22, D21, D81, G13

Suggested Citation

Stein, Luke C.D. and Stone, Elizabeth, The Effect of Uncertainty on Investment, Hiring, and R&D: Causal Evidence from Equity Options (October 4, 2013). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1649108 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1649108

Luke C.D. Stein (Contact Author)

Babson College ( email )

Tomasso Hall
231 Forest Street
Babson Park, MA 02457-0310
United States
781-239-5060 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://lukestein.com

Elizabeth Stone

Stanford University ( email )

Stanford, CA 94305
United States

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