To answer this question, we first create a measure of the opportunity costs of holding liquid assets as the wedge between the cost of capital and the return of firms’ cash portfolio. Exploiting both cross-sectional and time-series variation of opportunity costs, we estimate a negative...

Firms until recently were effectively constrained to hold liquid assets in non-interest-bearing accounts. As a result, the cost of capital of firms' liquid assets portfolios exceeded the return, especially when the risk-free interest rate was high. The spread between cost and return is the cost...