An Empirical Research On The Inventory Investment Behavior Of Listed Companies

In western developed countries,the inventory investment takes a quite small proportion of gross domestic product(GDP),only accounts for about 0.5%of GDP.But the change of the economic cycle is closely related to the change of the inventory investment in the process of economic operation.The periodic fluctuation of inventory investment like a shadow followed behind the periodic fluctuation of the economic cycle.When the economy was fluctuating,the inventory investment fluctuated sharply at the same time.Blinder once said that only after a thorough understanding of the inventory behavior can it is possible to understand the cyclical economy.The inventory is also an important asset of the enterprise.The raw material inventory affects the production directly and the product inventory affects the selling of the product,thus the inventory affects the financial position and operating results indirectly and also has an influence on realizing the value of the company.Obviously,the inventory investment not only plays an important role in the macro economy,but also plays a huge role in the micro enterprise.When researching on the inventory investment,many domestic and foreign scholars focused on the economic level.From the the perspective of macroeconomics,they studied the inventory investment behavior by using macroeconomic data.The paper selected a new point of view to study the inventory investment behavior of listed companies at the level of the micro enterprise,including the inventory investment behavior of listed companies,the differences of the inventory investment behavior in industries,the relationship between the inventory investment and the macro economy and also explained the influence of the inventory investment on the corporate value.The artical has made an empirical study with the financial data of Chinese listed companies from 2003 to 2014,established a multivariate regression model,and took Tobin's Q as the explained variable,and took the proportion of the inventory investment on total assets as the explanatory variable,and the debt to assets ratio,the return on equity,growth rate on sales,the property of the corporate and the macro economic cycle are used as control variables.By using the statistical software SPSS 19.0,the statistical analysis,the correlation analysis,the regression analysis and the robustness test were carried out,and the results of empirical test are summarized finally.The statistical analysis show that:(1)The annual average of the proportion of the inventory investment on total assets is 0.22 and the annual average of the rate of the annual change of the inventory investment is 0.36 from 2003 to 2014.(2)The annual average of the proportion of the inventory investment on total assets has little difference in different industries and the annual average of the rate of the annual change of the inventory investment has big difference in different industries.(3)There is no significant correlation between the annual average of the proportion of the inventory investment on total assets and the nominal economic growth rate,CPI,the inflation rate from 2003 to 2014.(4)There is no significant correlation between the annual average of the rate of the annual change of the inventory investment and the nominal economic growth rate,CPI,the inflation rate from 2003 to 2014.The empirical study show that:(1)Wheher it is state-owned enterprise or not,the proportion of the inventory investment on total assets has a significant inverted "U"relationship with the enterprise value.Compared to state-owned enterprise,the relationship is much obvious to non state-owned enterprise.(2)In a prosperity economic period,the proportion of the inventory investment on total assets has a significant inverted "U" relationship with the enterprise value,while in the recession period,that comes to a significant "U" relationship.