Department/School

Finance

Date of this version

2022

Document Type

Article

Keywords

Pandemic, Cash, Labor, Tele-workable, Working from home, Public health, Solvency, Liquidity, Risk, Financial constraint, Labor productivity, Labor uncertainty

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between firms’ cash holdings and pandemics. Our results show that as compared to tele-workable firms, whose employees can work remotely, non-tele-workable firms with more on-site employees increase cash during pandemics. This increase in cash comes from short-debt, preferred stocks, reduction in capital expenditures and discontinuation of some operations. Firms hold more cash as a reaction to higher default risk. For non-tele-workable firms, there is a positive relationship between abnormal stock returns and cash, suggesting that this increase in cash during pandemics is not driven by behavioral reasons, but by increases in uncertainty in labor productivity.

Published in

Journal of Business Finance and Accounting

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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