Corporate cash has become an increasingly large component of corporate balance sheets over the past fifty years. We survey the literature on corporate cash holdings that assesses (i) cross-sectional and time-series patterns in cash holdings; (ii) theoretical explanations for these patterns; and...

Previous studies report that cash holdings are more valuable for financially constrained firms than for unconstrained firms. We examine (i) why this is so and (ii) why some constrained firms appear to hold too little cash. Our results indicate that greater cash holdings are associated with...