主题：Upside and Downside Tails of Uncertainty, Irreversibility, and Firms’ Employment and Investment Plans: Evidence from Large Chinese Manufacturing Firms

报告人：卢柯霖，华中科技大学

摘要：Changes in uncertainty involve changes in the upside and downside tails. We study their causal effects on firms’ employment and investment plans. We field a survey experiment with large Chinese export manufacturers. After eliciting firms' future tariffs expectations, we impose various shock scenarios in which firms' perceived probabilities of tariff hikes (downside risk) and tariff cuts (upside risk) are exogenously increased or decreased, and then we elicit firms' employment and investment plans under these scenarios. Our design decomposes uncertainty into downside and upside tails, consistent with real-option and growth-option models in which each channel loads only on a single tail. We find clear real-option effects. The higher downside risk reduces planned employment and domestic routine investment, whereas it has no impact on foreign investment. However, a lower downside risk does not affect employment, but raises both domestic routine and technological investment. Most downside risk effects are stronger when the investment has greater irreversibility. Higher upside risk, though, only has a positive impact on technological investment plans in firms with lower irreversibility, consistent with the growth-option channel. Overall, the results show that which tail of uncertainty moves, and in which direction, matters for firm behavior.

报告人简介：卢柯霖，华中科技大学助理教授，本科毕业于北京师范大学经济与工管理学院经济系，博士毕业于印第安纳大学布卢明顿分校经济系。他的研究兴趣包括宏观经济学与行为经济学。在《Journal of Economics and Dynamics Control 》和《经济学季刊》上发表多篇论文。

时间：2025年11月25日（周二）11:30-13:00

地点：中央财经大学学院南路校区学术会堂712会议室

主办单位：创新发展学院中国经济与管理研究院