Financialization, Shareholder Orientation and the Cash Holdings of US Corporations

Leila Davis

Review of Political Economy, 2018, vol. 30, issue 1, 1-27

Abstract: Growth in the cash holdings of US nonfinancial corporations (NFCs) has received considerable attention in recent years. These cash holdings constitute a primary component of the growth in firm-level financial asset holdings often highlighted in analyses of the ‘financialization’ of NFCs. In this article, I use a panel of US corporations to empirically analyze two links between corporate cash holdings and the literature on financialization. First, I find a small but positive relationship between cash holdings and shareholder value ideology among large corporations. I capture the growing entrenchment of shareholder ideology using average industry-level stock repurchases, to proxy for industry-level norms encouraging managers to target stock price-based indicators of firm performance. Second, I find a positive relationship between a firm's cash holdings and a measure of the differential it earns between interest income and expense. Given that cash is classified with short-term marketable (and, therefore, interest-bearing) securities on firm balance sheets, this result lends empirical support to the hypothesis that traditionally nonfinancial firms are increasingly engaged in borrowing and lending for profit.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2018.1429147

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