Cash Holdings of Canadian Public Companies

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Seminar paper from the year 2023 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 2,0, University of Hamburg, course: Seminar: Empirical Financial Economics, language: English, abstract: Therefore, the purpose of this work is to find out how cash holdings have developed over time and what company-specific factors influences them. In this context, we examine the period from 1988 to 2021, following closely the approach of Bates. The main question is whether the findings from the literature are transferable to Canadian companies or if there are differences. To address this question, we will first briefly review the literature for the theoretical background in chapter 2, which we will refer to in our later empirical analysis. In chapter 3, we outline the composition and origin of our dataset, as well as the methodology. Chapter 4 looks at the development of cash and leverage holdings over the whole period. Section 5 examines whether there are sub-population specific differences in our dataset. In chapter 6, we utilize regression models of the cash ratios to see which corporate indicators have an impact on the cash ratios. Section 7 considers whether the agency theory has an impact on cash holdings. We conclude in chapter 8. Cash holdings are one of the most important components of a company. As the cash holdings of U.S. companies have increased remarkably over the last decades, the question arises whether this is also true for the geographic neighboring country Canada. Therefore, this thesis analyzes the corporate cash holdings of Canadian public companies. While the cash holdings of U.S. companies are well studied on a broad scale in the finance literature and Opler, there are only a few publications on Canada.