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 paper examines the extent to which Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) affect corporate cash holding policies. We construct an index (CFO index) that enables us to distinguish between "strong'' and "weak'' CFOs based on their ability to influence firm outcomes. We find that firms with strong...

We find that U.S. corporations increase their cash holdings in response to higher economic policy uncertainty. The increase in cash holdings is not attributed to a reduction in firm investments. This increase is more pronounced for financially constrained firms or those with larger exposure to...

We study how employment protection laws (EPLs) affect corporate cash-holding decision. By exploiting within-country changes in EPLs across 20 OECD countries as a source of variation in labor adjustment costs, we show that following an increase in the stringency of EPLs, firms' cash holdings...

Exploiting reforms of state covenants-not-to-compete laws to capture exogenous variation in barriers to compete for talent, I show that firms increase cash holdings when talent competition intensifies. The effect is concentrated among firms for which talent is more important and in industries...

This paper studies the effect of stock short selling on corporate cash holdings. Short selling can increase the cost of external financing and exacerbate financial constraints. Consistent with the precautionary motive, firms react to short-selling concerns by holding more cash. This paper...

The literature has provided mixed evidence on the relationship between cash holdings and average stock returns. We empirically verify that the relationship is positive and robust to the adjustment of risk, the construction of cash holdings portfolios, and the weighting scheme of portfolio...

Using a large sample of bank loans obtained by U.S. firms, we examine the relation between cash holdings and access to external finance via bank loans. We document a negative relation between cash holdings and loan spreads. This negative relation is confirmed in a sub-sample of quasi-exogenous...

Firms with high pre-crisis cash holdings invested significantly more than their cash-poor rivals during the global financial crisis and especially so during the recovery phase. This resulted in a persistent and growing investment gap between cash-rich and cash-poor firms. Cash especially...

This paper studies the relationship between investment volatility, capital structure, and cash levels. Our evidence suggests: i) firms with relatively high realizations of future investment volatility hold relatively low levels of debt and high levels of cash, ii) firms fund large investment by...