abstract: This paper examines how equity analysts' roles as information intermediaries and monitors affect corporate liquidity policy and its associated value of cash, providing new evidence that analysts have a direct impact on corporate liquidity policy. Greater analyst coverage (1) reduces information asymmetry between a firm and outside shareholders and (2) enhances the monitoring process. Consistent with these arguments, analyst coverage increases the value of cash, thereby allowing firms to hold more cash. The cash-to-assets ratio increases by 5.2 percentage points when moving from the bottom analyst-coverage decile to the top decile. The marginal value of $1 of corporate cash holdings is $0.93 for the bottom analyst-coverage decile and $1.83 for the top decile. The positive effects remain robust after a battery of endogeneity checks. I also perform tests employing a unique dataset that consists of public and private firms, as well as a dataset that consists of public firms that have gone private. A public firm with analyst coverage can hold approximately 8% more cash than its private counterpart. These findings constitute new evidence on the real effect of analyst coverage. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Business Administration 2012
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:asu.edu/item:14752 |
Date | January 2012 |
Contributors | Chang, Ching-Hung (Author), Bates, Thomas (Advisor), Bharath, Sreedhar (Committee member), Lindsey, Laura (Committee member), Arizona State University (Publisher) |
Source Sets | Arizona State University |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Doctoral Dissertation |
Format | 102 pages |
Rights | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/, All Rights Reserved |
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