Furthermore, efficient cash management is expected to significantly improve both the profitability and growth of a company. As a result of globalisation and the competitive environment, companies are seeking more sophisticated cash management solutions and focusing on standardised processes and strengthening internal controls, which will lead to a higher degree of centralisation of cash managem...

The literature on the Japanese Horizontal Keiretsu, or Main Bank System, is divided on the real effects of bank dependence on firm performance. This paper presents evidence on this issue for the 1980’s and 1990’s using a large sample of Japanese manufacturing firms. Using the eligibility criteria for domestic bond issues that were in place in the 1980’s as a firm sorting criteria, I find that i...

In this paper, we model cash flow and consumption growth rates as a vectorautoregression (VAR), from which we measure the response of cash flow growth to consumption shocks. As the appropriate cash flow proxy is not unambiguous, nor likely to be measured without error, we consider three alternatives for portfolio cash flows: cash dividends, dividends plus repurchases and corporate earnings. We ...

We study how firms engaged in both R&D and fixed investment manage liquidity and adjust real investment during the recent financial crisis. Among firms with positive R&D expenditures, cuts to fixed investment in the crisis are typically far more severe than cuts to R&D. These firms allocate cash reserves to buffer R&D but do not use cash to protect fixed investment. Some firms appear to go so f...

Agency problems are an important determinant of corporate cash holdings. For a sample of more than 11,000 firms from 45 countries, we find that corporations in countries where shareholders rights are not well protected hold up to twice as much cash as corporations in countries with good shareholder protection. In addition, when shareholder protection is poor, factors that generally drive the ne...

For as long as anyone remembers non-life insurance companies have used the so called chain ladder method to reserve for outstanding liabilities. When historical payments of claims are used as observations then chain ladder can be understood as estimating a multiplicative model. In most non-life insurance companies a mixture of paid data and expert knowledge, incurred data, is used as observatio...

Dual-class common stock allows for the separation of voting rights and cash-flow rights across the different classes of equity. We construct a large sample of dual-class firms in the United States and analyze the relationships of insider’s cash-flow rights and voting rights with firm value, performance, and investment behavior. We find that firm value is increasing in the level of cash-flow rig...

Non-linear external habit persistence models, which feature prominently in the recent “equity premium” asset pricing and macroeconomics literature, generate counterfactual predictions in the cross-section of stock returns. In particular, we show that in the absence of crosssectional heterogeneity in firms’ cash-flow risk, these models produce a “growth premium,” that is, stocks with high price-...

We test the predictions of several recent theories of how bank capital affects the rates that banks charge their borrowers. Key to all these theories is the notion that the relative bargaining power of a bank and its borrower are critical. We find that banks with low capital are more sensitive to borrower cash flow than are banks with high capital: lowcapital banks charge relatively more for bo...