IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/reroxx/v36y2023i1p827-844.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Cash holdings, the internal capital market, and capital allocation efficiency in listed companies

Author

Listed:
  • Jiahua Zhao
  • Minglin Wang
  • Qiuqin He

Abstract

The rise in firm-level cash asset ratios has become a prominent trend in countries around the world which may further influence the capital allocation efficiency. This study analysed the inefficient effect of cash holdings on the capital allocation by combining the internal capital market theory with principal–agent theory and asymmetric information theory. The theoretical hypotheses were tested using linear panel regression models based on financial data from Chinese listed enterprises. We found that corporations holding more cash assets had lower capital allocation efficiency than those with fewer cash assets, which is consistent with agency theory and asymmetric information theory. Internal capital markets exacerbated this adverse effect. Additional testing was conducted to examine the heterogeneity of this effect between different types of ownership and strategy; the findings showed that an increase in cash holdings had a greater marginal impact on overinvestment among privately owned enterprises and underinvestment among state-owned enterprises. Internal capital market operation alleviated the problem of overinvestment but exacerbated the problem of underinvestment in privately owned enterprises, whereas it increased overinvestment in state-owned enterprises. The results suggested that different types of enterprises should deal with the inefficient effect of cash assets based on the causes of inefficient investment.

Suggested Citation

  • Jiahua Zhao & Minglin Wang & Qiuqin He, 2023. "Cash holdings, the internal capital market, and capital allocation efficiency in listed companies," Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(1), pages 827-844, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:reroxx:v:36:y:2023:i:1:p:827-844
    DOI: 10.1080/1331677X.2022.2080740
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1331677X.2022.2080740
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/1331677X.2022.2080740?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bo, Le & Ibrahim, Haslindar & Li, Jia, 2024. "Impact of product market competition on the overconfidence cash holdings relationship in Chinese firms," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:reroxx:v:36:y:2023:i:1:p:827-844. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/rero .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.