However, the free cash flows scale is important for the financial health of the company, but it has also its own limitations. Moreover, it’s not immune from accounting tricks. Free cash flows can be considered as a measure of value for shareholders of listed companies on Tehran Stock Exchange. The managers of these companies have tended to use the earnings management for managing the free cash ...

We provide one of the first large sample comparisons of cash policies in public and private U.S. firms. We first show that despite higher financing frictions, private firms hold, on average, about half as much cash as public firms do. By examining the drivers of cash policies for each group, we are able to attribute the difference to the much higher agency costs in public firms. By combining ev...

With free cash flows, borrowers can accumulate cash or voluntarily pay down debts. However, sometimes creditors impose a mandatory repayment covenant called “excess cash flow sweep” in loan contracts to force borrowers to repay debts ahead of schedule. About 17% of borrowers in our sample (1995-2006) have this covenant attached to at least one of their loans. We find that the sweep covenant is ...

Diversified firms can trade at a discount to a matched portfolio of single-segment firms either because diversified firms have lower expected cash flows or because they have higher expected returns. We analyze whether diversification-discount firms have higher expected returns in order to compensate investors for offering less upside potential (or skewness exposure) than focused firms. Our empi...

The accruals anomaly, demonstrated by Sloan (1996), generated significant excess returns consistently for over four decades until 2002. Since then, the accruals anomaly has apparently disappeared. In this paper, I argue that one factor responsible for this decline is the increasing incidence of analysts’ cash flow forecasts which has provided markets with information about likely future accrual...

We report on a large number of laboratory market experiments demonstrating that a market bubble can be reduced under the following conditions: 1) a low initial liquidity level, i.e., less total cash than value of total shares, 2) deferred dividends, and 3) a bid–ask book that is open to traders. Conversely, a large bubble arises when the opposite conditions exist. The first part of the article ...

a r t i c l e i n f o We re-evaluate the cash flow–investment relation from a new angle in a setting where the firm can access capital markets and faces different investment opportunity sets. Instead of replying on cash flow, we introduce other forms of finance to interact with investment. We find that financial variables enter significantly into the investment regressions at different timing. ...