Modeling the demand for cash and deposits is a primary concern for central banks. Within a wide range of academic contributions, payment choice models based on transaction sizes (TS models) have been promoted. However, TS models induce strong predictions about the use of payment instruments. In particular, all equal-sized transactions are supposed to be paid with the same payment instrument. We...

Entrepreneurs need cash to finance their investments. Since cash is costly to hold, entrepreneurs underinvest. If entrepreneurs are able to access secondary financial markets, then they can sell some of their less liquid assets for cash and invest at a higher level. When the secondary financial markets are over-the-counter (OTC), the amount of liquidity (cash) that is in the market affects asse...

Treasury departments of financial institutions often view the management of physical cash as an unavoidable but necessary part of their business – and usually not as core to their business activities. Yet, on the other hand, cash is perceived as sensitive and in most cases cannot be outsourced completely. At the same time, even after many years of ongoing payment innovations, cash is by far sti...

Traditional cash flow estimation techniques focus on generating net cash flow estimates period-by-period, which are then discounted by the firm's cost of capital. While conceptually strong, this aggregation approach can be insensitive to the fine-grained detail so important to managing project cash flows, in particular, that investment returns are always a combination of growth (renewal) and de...

We analyze the nature of financial contracting when an entrepreneur can choose the specificity of investments and financial contracts are incomplete. Investing in projectspecific assets increases productivity but decreases liquidation value. This creates a strategic incentive to specialize assets to decrease the bargaining power of the financier when debt financing is used. By contrast, equity ...

In this article, we develop an integrated supplier–buyer inventory model with the assumption that the market demand is sensitive to the retail price and the supplier adopts a trade credit policy. The trade credit policy discussed in this paper is a ‘‘two-part’’ strategy: cash discount and delayed payment. That is, if the buyer pays within M1, the buyer receives a cash discount; otherwise, the f...

In this paper, we study the optimization problem confronted by an insurance firm whose management can control its cash-balance dynamics by adjusting the underlying premium rate. The firm’s objective is to minimize the total deviation of its cash-balance process to some pre-set target levels by selecting an appropriate premium policy. We study the problem in a general framework assuming the stat...

We characterize the optimal long-term financial contract in a setting in which a risk-neutral agent with limited capital seeks external financing for a project which pays stochastic cash flows over many periods. These cash flows are unobservable and unverifiable by outside investors. The agent can be induced to pay investors via the threat of the loss of control of the project. After solving fo...

Recent work in corporate finance has suggested that strategic debt-service by equityholders works to lower debt values and raise yield spreads substantially. We show that this is not quite correct. With optimal cash management, defaults occassioned by deliberate underperformance (“strategic defaults”) and those forced by inadequate cash (“liquidity defaults”) work as substitutes: allowing for s...