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Ethiopia suffers from structural food insecurity due to its low food production, low purchasing power, and climatic shocks such as drought. Coffee is Ethiopia's primary source of foreign earnings, and 95% of it is produced by smallholder farmers. Coffee also provide better income to smallholder farmers than other crops. However, it is unclear how much smallholder coffee producers participate in cash savings and if their savings help them attain food security. In this study, the authors aim to assess the impact of cash savings on the food security of smallholder coffee farmers in Ethiopia.

Using cross-sectional quantitative data from 336 randomly selected households and qualitative data from the local community, this study examines the impact of cash savings on household food security. Logistic regression and propensity score matching models were used to analyze the impact of cash savings on households' food security.

About, 43.5% of coffee farmers did not participate in cash savings during the study period, while 50.6% had no access to credit. The major factors that limit households' likelihood of participating in cash saving were the gender of household head and family size. Approximately, 38.4 and 27.1% of coffee farmers were food poor based on calorie intake and consumption scores, respectively. Households' participation in saving increases their ability to meet dietary energy requirements and consume diverse foods.

To the knowledge of the author, empirical studies that examined the impact of cash saving on the food security status of smallholder farmers in the study area are limited. Therefore, this study brings original contribution and fills research gap on coffee farmers' cash saving and food security; that received little attention from previous researchers in Ethiopia.

This paper assesses how discretionary accruals (DAs) affect corporate cash savings policies and the motivation behind this cash saving behavior and, also whether the linkage between DAs and cash saving affect the market-perceived cash value.

We construct the measure of DAs using the previous five-year average information to investigate the association of DAs with the change in cash. Moreover, the Faulkender and Wang (2006) methodology is utilized to examine the market-perceived cash value in DAs.

The key finding is that firms with high DAs save significantly more cash. A one standard deviation increase in DAs saves cash by 12.59%. Furthermore, the value of cash is low for these firms. The effect is stronger in firms with poor governance but not present in financially constrained firms.

The empirical evidence highlights DAs have negative effect on market-perceived cash value, which underscores the insight that managers manage earnings opportunistically using DAs.

Taken together, we provide more evidence on the literature of accruals in earnings manipulation.

Despite the almost universal belief to the contrary, inventory reduction should not be a major objective for investing in advanced manufacturing technology because the financial benefits from it can be relatively small compared with other benefits. This article describes how changes in inventory are valued and why inventory reductions can have a complex, and often negative, effect on profitability. High inventory levels are only a symptom of other problems; if these problems are not first identified and solved, inventory reductions can be counterproductive.

The purpose of this paper is to examine cash savings from six potential sources of cash: net equity issues, net debt issues, internally generated cash flows, asset sales, changes in short-term debt, and changes in net working capital.

The authors use both fixed effects and dynamic panel-data estimations to examine cash savings by using a sample of firms from 72 countries for the period 1991-2010.

The authors observe that net equity issue is the largest source of new funds while cash savings rates are highest for asset sales, changes in net working capital, and net equity issues. Constrained firms have higher total savings rates than unconstrained companies. The authors also find that savings rates are positively related to whether firms perform R & D, multinational status, and protection for creditors and investors.

The results suggest that firms usually use multiple channels when they increase their savings as opposed to relying only on one channel.

This study examines the association between corporate tax avoidance and the cost of debt (COD). It also investigates the moderating effect of integrated report (IR) assurance on tax avoidance/COD relationship.

Based on a sample of 76 South African companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) from 2010 to 2020, the authors built and estimated regression models using the feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) method. The authors significantly mitigated the endogeneity concerns using propensity score matching (PSM), difference-in-differences (DID) analysis and fixed effects regression.

The authors found that tax-avoiding firms pay higher costs of debt due to information asymmetries and agency problems. Bankers systematically reflect the increase in tax avoidance by adjusting the COD upward. However, results show that the assured IR disclosure mitigates these problems, which decreases the COD for tax avoidance strategies adopters. Using a quasi-natural experiment, well-grounded evidence was provided showing that the decrease in the COD for debtors who engage in tax avoidance practices is attributed to the availability of an assured IR.

This study provides plausible evidence in favor of the role that an assured IR can play in capital allocation decisions. Consequently, it is likely to push policymakers in South Africa and other countries to set standards for IR assurance.

This is the first study that investigates and validates the role of IR assurance in solving the controversy about the “tax saving effect” vs. “risk exposure effect” that bankers face while identifying debtors with successful (non-risky/cash-saving) tax avoidance practices and those with non-successful (risky) ones.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the effects of farm income variability, farm size, and other socio‐demographic characteristics on the precautionary saving behavior of farm households and to estimate the influences of the identified factors on the amount of savings by self‐employed farm households.

Using 2003 Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) data and a Double‐Hurdle procedure, the likelihood and the amount of savings by farm households are estimated.

An important empirical finding of this study is that variability in income plays an important role in explaining precautionary savings of US farm households. Findings suggest that farm households facing higher income risk save more and accumulate more wealth. It is indicated that several farm, operator, household, and demographic attributes contribute to the precautionary savings of farm households. In particular, results show that educational attainment by operator and spouses have positive impact on the decision to save. In addition, results from this study show that farms that specialize in cash grain are likely to have precautionary savings.

Farm households today are virtually indistinguishable from non‐farm households in their levels of income and diversity of employment. As a result, government policies that influence general economic conditions have much more profound impacts on farm families. Federal support of farm income warrants continued scrutiny. This paper shows that greater income uncertainty increases savings and wealth of farm households. Therefore, farm policies that reduce income variability or uncertainty will have an impact on precautionary savings and wealth of farm households.

Several studies have investigated savings of households; however, these studies are limited to entire US population, older Americans, or non‐self‐employed individuals in the USA. Little is known about the savings behavior of self‐employed US farm households owing to a lack of household survey data and because of the complex relationship between the farm household and farm business in terms of resource allocation (both capital and labor).

The operational component of a company’s short‐term plan (amounts of products to be delivered and sold to various markets at prices that vary according to markets, sales channels, types of customers and quantities sold, levels of utilization of production capacity, assignment of resources to the manufacturing of different products, amounts of raw materials purchased from different sources, stocks of raw materials and finished products) gives rise to a series of cash inflows and outflows which are not synchronized. The financial component of a company’s short‐term plan has to indicate how to compensate the imbalances, in time, generated by the operational plan, between availabilities and requirements of cash, and indicate the sources of financing to be used and how to temporarily invest cash surpluses. The approach, too often followed in companies, that defines the financial component of a company’s short‐term plan as a consequence of the operational component of the plan, ignores the potential interactions between them and the possibility of defining simultaneously a more economic interfunctionally integrated plan. A model is presented for the decisions in the operational component and a model for the decisions in the financial component. If these models are used separately, they can be integrated resorting to an iterative approach that mutually adapts their separate solutions in order to define the company plan. However, the best approach is to build a model that integrates the two separate models into one structured in a way that can define the optimal integrated short‐term operational and financial plan. The lack of integration between the operational and the financial components of the short‐term company plan is a common weak point in the existing literature and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between corporate tax aggressiveness and cash holdings and that between corporate tax aggressiveness and the value of cash. Further, this study explores the impact of the tax enforcement level on the above associations.

Under a Chinese special institutional background, this study constructs tax aggressiveness and tax enforcement measures. On this basis, using a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies over the period from 1990 to 2010, this study empirically tests the association between tax enforcement, corporate tax aggressiveness, and cash holdings.

By empirically testing with Chinese listed companies as the sample, this paper finds the following: with the increase in the tax avoidance level, the precautionary incentives of cash, and the level of financial constraint likewise increase, which will make the level of firm cash savings increase. Meanwhile, although tax avoidance will induce lower transparency and higher agency costs, the marginal value of the cash held by the more aggressive firms is higher due to the higher market competition effect of the cash. Additional tests suggest that, the tax enforcement level can weaken the effect of tax avoidance on the transparency and agency problem; however, because the tax enforcement level can also increase the tax risk of the firm, the positive relation between firm’s tax avoidance and cash savings is strengthened correspondingly. On the value of cash holdings, the tax enforcement level can also make the marginal value of tax aggressive firms higher.

First, this paper provides new evidence on the determinants of firm’s cash holdings from the perspective of cash savings. Second, this paper examines the association between Chinese firm’s tax aggressiveness and the value of cash, which not only provides evidence for the local tax literature but also has reference value for the foreign literature. Third, this paper has reference value for research on the association between corporate tax avoidance activities and other operating decisions. Finally, this paper not only provides new evidence on the association between tax enforcement and corporate governance, but also extends the prior literature on the association between corporate tax aggressiveness and cash holdings.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the effect of French family control on the cash flow sensitivity of cash (CFSC). It also investigates the moderating effect of board of directors’ features on this relation.

Based on a sample of French-listed companies from 2012 to 2014, the authors use GLS regression models on panel data estimated with robust standard errors, clustered at the firm level.

The results show that family control is positively associated with the CFSC. This finding suggests that families are likely to hold more cash out of their cash flows for entrenchment and expropriation purposes. A further analysis shows that board size, independence and the two-tier board structure negatively affect the CFSC in family firms. Board efficiency is then a guarantee of minority shareholders’ interests against family expropriation risks in France.

These findings suggest that French family firms are likely to expropriate minority interests by extracting rents through their cash holding behavior. However, in the presence of high-quality board features, the relation turns negative, suggesting that the quality of the board is an efficient corporate governance device that is likely to monitor family corporate decisions.

This paper extends previous research by investigating the moderating effect of board features on the relation between family control and the CFSC. The research provides a metric for agency problems that is the sensitivity of cash to cash flows and offers theoretical support for the agency argument of hoarding cash.

This paper examines the effects of managerial optimism on corporate cash holdings.

The authors construct a novel measure of managerial optimism based on the linguistic tone of annual reports by applying a Naïve Bayesian Machine Learning algorithm to non-numeric parts of Vietnamese listed firms' reports from 2010 to 2016. The paper employs firm and year fixed effects model and also uses the generalized method of moments estimation as robustness checks.

The authors find that the cash holding of firms managed by optimistic managers is higher than the cash holdings of firms managed by non-optimistic managers. Managerial optimism also influences corporate cash holdings through internal cash flows and the current year’s capital expenditures. Although the authors find no evidence that optimistic managers hold more cash to finance future growth opportunities in general, optimistic managers hold more cash for near future investment opportunities than non-optimistic managers do.

The novel measure proposed in this study is expected to provide great potential for future finance studies investigating the relation between managerial traits and corporate policies since it is applicable for any levels of financial market development. In addition, the findings highlight the important role, both direct and indirect, of managerial optimism on cash holdings. Related future research should take this psychological trait into account to gain a better understanding of corporate cash holding.

This paper helps to extend the literature on managerial optimism measurement by introducing a new measure of managerial optimism based on the linguistic tone of annual reports. Furthermore, this is among the first studies directly linking annual report linguistic tone to cash holding. The paper also provides new evidence regarding how managerial optimism affects the relationship between the firm's growth opportunities and cash holding, given that mispricing corrections are naturally uncertain.