It is well known that the separation of ownership and control in public firms causes tension between investors and managers. These so-called “agency problems” are particularly pronounced in the use of corporate cash holdings because it is both easy for managers to misuse cash and hard for investors to evaluate the appropriateness of mangers’ use of cash. Moreover, cash holdings account for a substantial proportion of corporate assets (about 25% of total assets in recent years). Therefore, since firms with better internal corporate governance tend to use their cash holdings more for the benefit of their investors rather than their managers, it is not surprising that investors are willing to pay a higher price for them.

In the paper, Investor Horizons and Corporate Cash Holdings, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we study how the investment horizons of a firm’s institutional investors affect the agency costs of corporate cash holdings. It is widely recognized that monitoring by institutional investors of managers increases firm value. However, not all institutional investors are created equal, and, one important way in which they differ is their investment horizons. Differences in investment horizons arise, for example, because of differences in investment strategies (e.g., short-term hedge funds) and/or differences in the maturity of liabilities (e.g., long-term pension funds).

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