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台灣上市公司的現金持有、現金持有價值與公司生命週期：預防性動機假說之驗證
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Mature
) and testing the difference in average cash ratio (measured as the ratio of cash either
to the book value of total assets or to book value of net assets (total assets minus cash))
between
Young
and
Mature
firms. It is expected that the cash ratio of
Young
firms is
significantly larger than that of
Mature
firms. We also investigate the degree of precautionary
motive (proxied by industry-level volatility in cash flow, market-to-book ratio, density of
capital expenditures, R&D intensity, financing deficit, and firm size) in
Young
and
Mature
firms. It is expected that
Young
(
Mature
) TWSE-listed firms exhibit a higher (lower) degree
of precautionary saving motive.
We then design two empirical methods to document that TWSE-listed firms holding
less cash over their corporate life cycles can be explained by the precautionary savings
motive. The details of the first method are as follows: (1) we sort the entire sample into 49
portfolios based on their firm age and calculate average cash ratio for each portfolio as the
dependent variable (denoted as
AvgCash
); (2) we then calculate the average of
precautionary-based measures for each portfolio as the independent variables; these
precautionary-based measures include industry-level volatility in cash flows (
AvgCFVOL
IND
),
firm size (
AvgSIZE
), market-to-book ratio (
AvgMB
), capital expenditure density
(
AvgCAPEX
), R&D intensity (
AvgRD
A
), and financial deficit measures (
AvgDEF
); (3) finally,
we run the following regression model:
AvgCash
k
=
β
0
+
β
1
AvgPRE
k
+
β
2
AvgCF
k
+
β
3
AvgNWC
k
+
β
4
AvgDEBT
k
+
ε
k
where
k
= 1, 2,…, 49
(1)
where
AvgCash
k
is firm age portfolio
k
’s cash ratio;
AvgPRE
k
is firm age portfolio
k
’s
precautionary-based measure that proxies either
AvgCFVOL
IND
,
AvgSIZE
,
AvgMB
,
AvgCAPEX
,
AvgRD
A
, or
AvgDEF
;
AvgCF
k
is firm age portfolio
k
’s cash flow;
AvgNWC
k
is
firm age portfolio
k
’s net working capital (net cash); and
AvgDEBT
k
is firm age portfolio
k
’s
total debt ratio. If the precautionary savings motive plays an important role in explaining the
decrease in cash holding over a firm’s life cycle, it should be observed that the coefficient of
AvgSIZE
is significantly negative, and that the coefficient of either
AvgCFVOL
IND
,
AvgMB
,
AvgCAPEX
,
AvgRD
A
, or
AvgDEF
is significantly positive.
To aid in the interpretation of our results, we also compute how actual cash holdings in
both young and mature firms differ from cash holdings predicted by the precautionary
savings model. If the precautionary savings motive is important for the decrease in cash
holdings over the corporate life cycle, we should see that the difference between