The objective of this paper is to validate the existence of an extensively documented secular upward trend in corporate cash holding. To do this, we use the new data for Poland and review original datasets from Bates et al. [2009] for the U.S. We find no trace of a trend for Poland and believe...

The proportion of assets held by the average Canadian firm in the form of cash has increased steadily since the early 1990s, and is now roughly twice as large as in 1990. The literature has established that the cash-holding behaviour of firms is highly correlated with financial constraints and...

There is anecdotal evidence that the primary reason why managers hold cash on their balance sheets is to cover operating losses (operating shortfalls). In this paper, we rationalize this as an optimal response in a world with contract heterogeneity. Specifically, we relax the standard assumption...

This paper investigates the determinants of a broad sample of Swiss non-financial firms’ cash holdings between 1995 and 2004. The median Swiss firm holds almost twice as much cash and cash equivalents as the median U.S. or U.K. firm. Our results indicate that asset tangibility and firm size...