This paper addresses the following unresolved questions: Why do some firms issue equity instead of debt? Why did most firms retain their cash holdings instead of distributing them as dividends in recent times? How do firms change their financing policies during a period of severe financial...

This paper addresses the following unresolved questions: Why do some firms issue equity instead of debt? Why did most firms retain their cash holdings instead of distributing them as dividends in recent times? How do firms change their financing policies during a period of severe financial...

We examine firms' simultaneous choice of investment, debt financing and liquidity in a large sample of US corporates between 1980 and 2014. We partition the sample according to the firms' financial constraints and their needs to hedge against future shortfalls in operating income. In contrast to...

Intuition suggests that firms with higher cash holdings should be 'safer' and have lower credit spreads. Yet empirically, the correlation between cash and spreads is robustly positive. This puzzling finding can be explained by the precautionary motive for saving cash, which in our model causes...

Ensuring that a firm has sufficient liquidity to finance valuable projects that occur in the future is at the heart of the practice of financial management. Yet, while discussion of these issues goes back at least to Keynes (1936), a substantial literature on the ways in which firms manage...

We examine the strategic role of cash in a two-stage competition model featuring a first-mover advantage in product markets and time delays in outside financing. Due to the joint effect of the first-mover advantage, time to finance, market profitability, participation cost, and the arrival rate...

This research examines the relations between government economic policy uncertainty and firm cash holdings and the value of cash. We find robust evidence that policy uncertainty is positively related to corporate cash holdings due to firms' precautionary motives and investment delays. Policy...

This paper provides new evidence on the link between financial constraints and corporate cash policy. Using time-series data for US public and private manufacturing firms, we find negative correlation between cash holdings and cost-of-carry for large firms. We find no evidence of such a relation...

The traditional link between the cash conversion cycle and the firm's profitability is that shortening the cash conversion cycle increases firm's profitability. On the other hand shortening the cash conversion cycle could harm the firm's operations and reduce profitability. This could happen...

We investigate the liquidity management of firms following the inception of credit default swaps (CDS) markets on their debt, which allow hedging and speculative trading on credit risk to be carried out by creditors and other parties. We find that reference firms hold more cash after CDS trading...