Determinants of a firm's cash holdings have been a popular topic of research in finance, especially after the rapid surge in cash holdings for U.S. firms since the 1980s. The wide array of research has focused primarily on firm-specific factors to explain the cross-sectional variations but has...

This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of non-financial firms' liquid assets and uncertainty. We develop a partial equilibrium model of precautionary demand for liquid assets showing that firms alter their liquidity ratio in response to changes in either macroeconomic or...

We study the effect of systematic uncertainty on firms' precautionary saving motives. As systematic uncertainty changes firms' operational and investment policies, its implications on firm cash holdings remain unclear. Using a GARCH-model based methodology, we construct novel, forward-looking...

We examine the puzzling negative relation between financial distress risk and the cross-section of expected returns. We find that the negative relation is most pronounced for up to six months after portfolio formation but after that, high distress stocks eventually earn persistently high...

This paper distinguishes political uncertainty from policy uncertainty shocks and uncovers new empirical facts about how each impacts the aggregate cash holdings of US firms. Our baseline structural vector autoregression model shows that an exogenous one standard deviation shock to political and...