The determinants of corporate cash holdings levels: evidence from selected South African retail firms

This study aims to contribute to the emergence of the literature focusing on exploring the factors influencing the financing decision, as well as examining the relationship between the firm size, profitability and firm growth towards the corporate debt. Questions such as how relevant firm size, profitability and firm growth to debt are, quantitatively, had not been fully answered in the business literature. The purpose of this study is to fill this large gap by examining the role of the firm size, profitability, investment and firm growth for the corporate debt. This study tries to examine the determinants of debt in the financial literature which include size, growth, business risk, and profitability in accordance with the capital structure theory, in manufacturing firms in Indonesia. The sample contained financial data from 150 firms for the period 2012–2017. The results showed that the manufacturing firms in Indonesia had high debt levels, especially the size, profitability, firm growth and profitability had proven to be the debt determinants, which also confirmed the Pecking Order Theory. This study also found that the management preference of manufacturing firms in Indonesia for risk was the risk-seeker or risk-neutral ones. This finding implies that the choice of funding sources originating from debt still provided greater returns compared to the capital cost needed due to business uncertainties.

A firm’s capital structure decisions constitute an essential research topic academically and practically. In this study, the author uses the data of US listed firms to test the traditional trade-off theory of capital structure, which posits that firms should balance the benefit of tax shields and costs of financial distress to purse an optimal debt ratio. Therefore, to determine the complex relationship between firm value and debt ratio and avoid the problem of model misspecification, the author adopts the non-parametric fixed effect model and semi-parametric (partially linear) fixed effect model. Our empirical results reveal that a nonlinear and asymmetric relationship exists between firm value and market debt ratio, thus, considerably supporting trade-off theory. Moreover, the use of different definitions of key variables and various kernel functions engenders robust results. Overall, the author suggests that firm managers should employ financial leverages appropriately to maximize firm value.

Cash holding decision is a very crucial decision that strongly affects the performance of an organization. Corporate dynamism as a corporate governance tool was explored in this study in order to establish its relationship with cash holding decision in listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria. Board skill, female leadership, foreign directors, board ownership and directors’ compensation were used as proxies for corporate dynamism. A panel regression model was adopted in this study to examine the implication of corporate dynamism on cash holding decisions spanning six years from 2012 to 2017. Random sampling technique was employed in order to arrive at thirty firms out of thirty-seven listed manufacturing firms, which comprised industrial and consumer goods sector. Board ownership and the existence of foreign expatriates were found to have a significant effect on cash holding decisions. It is concluded that directors with significant holdings tend to be more aggressive towards activities that enhance the performance of a firm, one of which is ensuring that optimal level of cash is held at a particular point in time in order to guide against liquidity problems, which may be caused by overtrading or even keeping excess idle cash, which is supposed to be invested in profitable ventures. Also, the fact that the existence of foreign expatriates will affect cash holding decisions, which may be justified by the fact foreign expatriates are displaying expertise because of diverse experience that they have been able to gain from different parts of the world.