We advance the feedback/cash as ammunition hypothesis, namely that firms hold cash to address feedback from stock prices to cash ows and growth opportunities. Firms with more liquid stocks are expected to hold more cash, the opposite of the prediction from a standard information asymmetry...

Management, directly or indirectly, learns from its firm's stock price, so that a more informative stock price should make the firm more productive. We show that stock price informativeness increases firm productivity. We predict and confirm that the productivity of smaller and younger firms,...