China's monetary policy surprises and corporate real investment

Abstract

We evaluate the effect of China's monetary policy shocks on corporate real investment. We propose a new approach to identify China's monetary policy shocks using high-frequency surprises based on treasury futures around monetary policy announcements as external instruments. We then estimate the dynamic effect of monetary policy shocks on corporate real investment using a rich firm-level data of all listed non-financial firms in China. We find that an unexpected monetary policy easing boosts firms' investment expenditures with heterogeneous dynamic responses across firms: small-sized firms have quicker responses than large-sized firms, especially for non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs). We show that sales revenue response could be the channel through which monetary policy shock transmits to non-SOEs' investment expenditures in China.