"We argue that a firm's aggregate risk is a key determinant of whether it manages its future liquidity needs through cash reserves or bank lines of credit. Banks create liquidity for firms by pooling their idiosyncratic risks. As a result, firms with high aggregate risk find it costly to get...

"Intuition suggests that firms with higher cash holdings are safer and should have lower credit spreads. Yet empirically, the correlation between cash and spreads is robustly positive and higher for lower credit ratings. This puzzling finding can be explained by the precautionary motive for...

Defining normal cash holdings as the holdings a firm with the same characteristics would have had in the late 1990s, we find that the average abnormal cash holdings of U.S. firms after the financial crisis amount to 10% of cash holdings, which represents an 87% increase in abnormal cash holdings...