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Interest rates are part of the fabric of finance, used for assessing rates of return on investments, determining costs of capital to firms, compounding and discounting cash flows, and as underlying variables in many derivative instruments. As interest rates change, so do values of associated securities, resulting in substantial risk to investors in these financial products. Interest rate risk measurement is often defined in terms of the sensitivity of prices to changes in interest rates. Duration is a measure used for small changes in rates, and convexity provides a correction to duration when the rate changes are larger. Forecasting how short- and long-term rates move based on macroeconomic factors becomes important for businesses in any country, as these rate changes affect borrowing costs and investment opportunities. Financial institutions carry out interest rate risk management using instruments such as interest rate swaps, or through more advanced approaches such as asset-liability management and gap analysis.

When firms experience increases in sales that they consider to be permanent, the present value of expected profits also increases, leading to increases in the firms' investments. Our study investigates the permanent sales hypothesis (PSH) of firms' investment; it examines whether investment decisions are influenced by changes in the permanent, in contrast to transitory, component of sales income increases. Using the co-integration test and the structural vector auto-regression (SVAR) framework, our paper finds strong support for the hypothesis that investment behavior is primarily explained by permanent changes in sales income. Empirical multiple time series regression results also confirm that investments are a function of a number of past yearly sales changes. Our results show that larger, more liquid, and lower debt ratio firms follow PSH more closely than smaller, less liquid, higher debt ratio firms. Recent studies on corporate investment (i.e., Fazzari, Hubbard, and Petersen, 1988) have argued that the higher the dependence on the internal source of funding of the investment, the stronger the severity of financing constraints. Our study shows that the more dependent on the permanent cumulative increase of internal source of funding a firm's funding on investment, the less financially constrained firms.