미래현금흐름의 예측가능성과 현금보유수준의 관계에 관한 연구

We investigate the relation between future cash flow predictability and corporate cash holdings focusing on the signaling effect of accruals which contains management’s private information about a firm’s operations and environment. We use the sample of firms listed on the Korea Stock Exchange and KOSDAQ over the period of 1990～2013 for the analyses. Prior studies on corporate cash holdings use cash flow volatility as a proxy for the predictability of future cash flows. However, several studies have documented that the accruals component of earnings contain management’s private information about the firm’s future operations (Subramanyam, 1996) and predict future cash flows more accurately if accruals and cash flow component of earnings are considered together than using the cash flow component of earnings alone (Dechow et al., 1998). In this study, we consider both cash flows and accruals components of earning and utilize earnings volatility and accruals volatility as well as cash flow volatility to proxy for the predictability of a firm’s future cash flows. We find that the volatility of cash flows, accruals, and earnings are positively associated with the corporate cash holdings and provide evidence that accruals, besides operating cash flows of the firm, contains useful information in explaining the firm’s cash holding levels. We further conduct analysis to find out whether the relationship between volatility of earnings components and corporate cash holdings differs between financially constrained firms and financially healthy firms. We find a statistically significantly positive relationship between volatility of earnings components and corporate cash holdings is significant only for financially constrained firms. These findings seem to indicate that when the financially constrained firms have uncertainties in predicting future operating cash flows, they hold higher cash holdings in order to reduce liquidity costs in the event of unexpected cash shortages.