Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between firm value and cash holdings for the period 2003-2008. This study seeks to find if there are costs and benefits associated with holding too much or too little cash, then an optimal cash level exists where marginal benefits are offset by their costs. If this optimal point exists, then firm value will be maximized at that point and deviation from it will affect the firm value negatively.

Optimal cash level between firm value and cash holding is determined by investigating the concave relationship. If concave relationship exists then a residual term is included in the equation to see how deviations from the optimal level affect firm value. A two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator is used in estimating all results. GMM controls for unobserved firm heterogeneity and endogeneity problems.

Results showed that a concave relationship exists between firm value and cash holdings, which confirmed that there is an optimal cash level that maximizes firm value. It was also found that deviations from the optimal level affect firm value negatively.

The paper provides the existence of an optimal point of cash between costs and benefits wherein firm value is maximized. It has implications for firms’ investment and financing decisions when there is limited access to external finance. At higher level of cash the study has implications for agency theory and governance practices.

The study establishes a conclusive relationship between firm value and cash holdings within the context of the Pakistani market.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the asymmetric adjustment of cash holdings in Pakistani firms for above and below target firms.

The study employs generalized method of moments (GMM) to investigate the adjustment of cash holdings.

The study found that the firms which hold cash above the optimal level of cash holdings have higher speed of adjustment than the firms which hold cash below the optimal level. Financially constrained (FC) firms also adjust their cash holdings faster than financially unconstrained (FUC) firms but high speed of downward adjustment does not remain persistent after financial constraints are controlled. Findings of this study reveal this asymmetric adjustment in above and below target firms and extend these results in FC and FUC Pakistani listed firms, respectively.

The conclusion of this study has been derived under certain limitations. There is a vast space to extend this study in different dimensions. Firms operating in capital-intensive industries may provide different results for financial constraints because their policy designing would be quite different from other firms.

This study contributes to cash holdings research in Pakistan by exploring the adjustment behavior of cash holdings across Pakistani non-financial firms using econometric modeling. Downward adjustment rate is supposed to be higher than upward adjustment rate and this rate is tested using dynamic panel data model. Similarly, it is inferred that this relationship holds for above target firms even after including the financial constraints in the presented model.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the incremental difference between the actual level of cash from the optimal amount (excess and insufficient cash) to the abnormal amount of cash (abnormal positive and negative changes in cash) leads to an increase in audit fees.

To investigate the main purpose of this study, first, the authors, respectively, estimate the optimal cash flow and the normal (optimal) changes in cash by Oler and Picconi (2014) and Bates, Kahle and Stulz (2009) models for each period. In this regard, financial information of 116 companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange is selected during the period 2011-2016.

The results of this investigation indicate that holding an excessive amount of cash than optimal size and audit fees are negatively associated. Moreover, it is documented that abnormal changes in cash flow and audit fees are not significantly associated.

The outcomes of the current study contribute to providing an accurate estimation to determine audit fees in emerging markets.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how corporate cash holdings changes across firm life cycle and how firms undergo heterogeneous dynamic cash adjustment as they advance from one stage to the next stage.

This study uses an extensive data set of 2,994 Chinese A-listed firms. The authors use generalized method of moments (GMM) and Fisher Panel unit root testing to investigate the targeting behavior of Chinese firms.

The uni-variate investigation reveals that firms in the growth stage exhibits the highest cash levels and firms in the decline stage report the lowest cash levels. As growth firms have high investment needs, they may require raising external capital to meet investment needs. To avoid the costly external financing, firms in growth stage tend to hold more cash. The GMM estimation reveals that along all the phases of firm life cycle there are evidences of trade-off behavior of corporate cash holdings. The authors report that adjustment rate increases as firms enters into the growth stage.

The findings provide both theoretical and practical insight to align cash policies with the available strategic choices along firm life cycle in an emerging market characterized by market imperfections.

The study is unique from the context that it is applying robust methodology to one of rarely investigated area in corporate cash policy. The peculiar Chinese study setting characterized by higher information asymmetry, high cost of external financing and heterogeneous access to financing sources provide theoretical and empirical underpinnings to investigate and gain insight about how corporate cash policy can be aligned with strategic choices available across different stages of life cycle.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the dynamics between executive ownership and excess cash policy in the UK.

The authors identify firms adopting an excess policy using a joint criterion of high cash and cash higher than the target. Logit analysis is used to estimate the impact of executive ownership and other governance characteristics on the probability of adopting an excess cash policy.

The results suggest that, in the UK, the impact of the executive ownership on the probability of adopting an excess cash policy is non-monotonic, in line with the alignment-entrenchment hypothesis. The results are robust to different definitions of excess cash policy, to alternative specifications of the regression model, to different estimation frameworks and to alternative proxies of ownership concentration.

The authors’ approach provides a new measure of the excess target cash for the firm. They show the need to identify an excess target cash policy not only by using an empirical criterion and a theoretical target level of cash, but also by capturing persistence in deviation from the target cash level. The authors’ measure of excess target cash calls into questions findings from previous studies. The authors’ approach can be used to explore whether excess cash holdings of UK firms and the impact of managerial ownership have changed from before the crisis to after the crisis.

The authors’ measure of excess target cash allows identifying in practice levels of cash which are abnormal with respect to an equilibrium level. UK firms should be cautious in using executive ownership as a corporate governance mechanism, as this may generate suboptimal cash holdings and suboptimal firm value. Excess cash policy might be driven not only by a poor corporate governance system, but also by the interplay between agency costs of managerial opportunism and cost of the external finance which further research could explore.

Actually, “how much cash is too much” is a question that has not been addressed by the literature. The authors address this question. Also, this amount of cash allows the authors to study the extent to which executive ownership contributes to explain the out-of-equilibrium persistency in the cash level.

The purpose of this study is to explore the association between cash holdings and business strategy for nonfinancial and nonutility US firms over the period from 1970 to 2016.

The authors have used Miles and Snow's (1978, 2003) theoretical background and followed Bentley et al. (2013) to construct a strategy index. Thus, the authors have distinguished two extreme corporate strategies, prospectors and defenders, based on a firm's resource allocation and investment behavior patterns. Following the methodology of Bates et al. (2009), the authors have used the multiple regression analysis to explore the relationship between business strategy and corporate cash holdings.

The empirical results show that business strategy is positively related to cash holdings. Prospectors are more likely to hold higher cash levels than defenders. Furthermore, the authors have found that cash holding's speed of adjustment (SOA) is slower for prospectors than for defenders, suggesting that business strategy influences cash holding's trend. Interestingly, the results show that the market value of cash increases significantly only for the firms that pursue a defender strategy.

The results of this work have valuable implications for researchers, by unveiling the relationship between corporate strategy and firm's cash holdings. This study, however, is limited to a sample of US firms; empirical evidence based on international samples of firms would add value to the current literature.

The findings could be useful to financial managers and investment strategists, who seek to maximize firm value through the adoption of an effective liquidity policy. What is more, this study provides support for the view that strategic choice and optimal cash management are of great importance for firms' market value.

This study enriches the knowledge of business strategy's impact on financing policy of firms and contributes to the empirical literature of cash holdings' determinants. In addition, it complements previous studies on US firms by documenting the effect of business strategy on the SOA in cash holdings and firm value.

This paper aims to investigate the possible non-linear effect of net working capital (NWC) level on profitability for Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region listed companies. Furthermore, the study tests the possible interactive effect of cash levels on the relationship between NWC and profitability.

NWC level is the independent variable and profitability is the dependent variable using two proxies, return on assets (ROA) and returns on equity (ROE). Control variables are size, leverage, gross domestic product growth and sales revenue growth. The generalized method of moments was used to analyze the data of 134 consumer-goods listed firms in 12 MENA countries for the period 2013–2019.

The results demonstrate that NWC levels had a non-linear effect on profitability using ROA as a profitability proxy while results were insignificant using ROE as a profitability proxy. Furthermore, results show the absence of interactive effects between NWC, cash levels and both profitability proxies.

The study fills a gap in the working capital management (WCM) literature by providing new evidence on WCM’s non-linear effect of corporate performance in the MENA region emerging markets using the consumer-goods industry sample. The study contributes to the financial managers’ working capital optimization efforts in the MENA region by providing evidence on the usefulness of WC optimization efforts in the region from a financial performance point of view. According to the researchers’ knowledge, a few studies attempted to investigate this non-linear relationship for neither MENA region countries nor the consumer-goods industry.

This paper examines whether family control exerts any influence on corporate cash holdings in Indian listed firms. It also examines how this accumulated cash of family firms impacts firm value.

The study uses dynamic panel data regression estimated using two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) on S&P BSE 500 firms during 2009–2018 for testing the repercussions of family control on the cash levels of a firm. Further, fixed effects regression has been employed for the valuation analysis.

Estimation results showed that family control negatively impacts cash holdings in Indian firms. Further, the cash accumulation by family firms adversely affects the market valuation of the firm. These findings signal a principal–principal (P-P) agency conflict in Indian family firms, i.e. friction between family owners and minority shareholders' interests. Minority shareholders fear that a part of the cash reserves will be used by family members for personal benefits. Thus, they discount cash reserves in family firms.

The study adds to the determinants of corporate cash holdings in emerging markets. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study from India investigating family control as a determinant of cash policy. It sheds light on the P-P agency conflict in Indian family firms. P-P agency conflict is less researched in cash holdings literature as opposed to the principal–agent managerial disputes. Also, the study uses a more comprehensive definition of family control rather than just considering the ownership as used in prior cash holding research.

The purpose of this paper is to identify firms in the UK adopting a policy of high cash and low leverage and investigate how executive ownership contributes to this decision.

Firms following this policy are identified both by using a fixed classification approach and the analysis of the distribution of cash and leverage. Logit analysis is then used to estimate the probability of adopting the policy as a function of executive ownership.

Extreme financial policies are suboptimal as firms adopting these policies tend to undershoot (overshoot) their target leverage (cash holdings) ratios. The impact of the executive ownership on the probability of adopting this policy is U-shaped, in line with the alignment–entrenchment hypothesis.

Despite the substantial presence of non-executive directors in the boards and a significant amount of shareholdings by executive directors, the firms under analysis have adopted suboptimal financial policies possibly because poorly governed or because executive ownership is the range where entrenchment is feasible.

This is the first attempt at recognising policies of high cash and low leverage as being explicitly interdependent. It is also the first study focussing on the UK, a country of interest, because ownership structure is relatively dispersed. Moreover, instead of choosing fixed threshold levels of the variable in defining the extreme financial policy, this paper proposes the analysis of the distribution of cash holdings and leverage and accounts for target levels of cash and leverage.

This study aims to provide a review of corporate governance and cash holdings because strong corporate governance is necessary for the efficient utilization of firm’s liquid resources such as cash, to minimize the agency cost of high cash holdings and to improve the value of cash.

The authors provide a literature review of corporate governance and cash holdings through a conceptual and theoretical argument rather than empirical research.

The authors review an empirical and theoretical work surrounding key corporate governance variables and identify avenues for future research. The authors find that corporate governance mechanisms and cash holdings have received much attention during the past two decades. However, the significant role of corporate governance (both country-level and the firm-level) in controlling the entrenched behaviour of the managers is discussed separately in the literature. The combined effect of both country-level and the firm-level governance is lacking in the cash holdings literature. Additionally, this study has found that much attention is paid to the developed markets, while only a few focused on the developing markets regarding cash holding literature, although the agency problems are high in developing markets.

The study contributes to the growing literature on corporate governance and cash holdings and provides a further understanding of the role of governance in minimizing the agency cost to increase value by assuring that firms’ assets are used efficiently and productively in the best interests of investors and other stakeholders. In addition, it provides a new idea to the policymaker and future researchers where they need to do more work.