Decisiones de Inversión en Empresas con Dolarización Financiera: Un modelo Umbral del Efecto Hoja de Balance

This paper has two goals: the first one is the assessment of the balance sheet effect for the Peruvian economy. The second goal is the appraisal of the relationship between the balance sheet effect and the dollarization levels of the financial statements of non-financial enterprises in Peru. In this regard, we analyzed 114 companies and used accounting information for the period 1998-2009. At the beginning, our estimates included different specifications excluding controls for the competitiveness effect in order to distinguish which effect has the most sizable impact: either the competitiveness effect (positive) or the net worth effect (negative). We found out that the latter one is statistically significant and has the strongest impact. According to this result, in the event of a depreciation of the exchange rate, the firms which hold liabilities denominated in a foreign currency will invest less than other firms whose liabilities are denominated in the national currency. In a second stage, our estimates included different controls for the competitiveness effect, which allow us to include both effects in the equation of investment in order to estimate their individual impacts in the same equation. Our results showed that both of them are statistically significant and have the expected signs. These results are robust to different techniques of estimation and to the inclusion of controls of aggregate shocks different from the exchange rate. Lastly, we estimated a regime switching model of investment which concludes that the balance sheet effect depends on the level of dollarization of the financial statements of non-financial enterprises.