Coming full circle on cash holdings and firm value: A comment on Kim and Bettis (2014), Theissen et al. (2023), and Souder et al. (2024)

Abstract

In their recent article, Theissen et al. (2023) re-examined the seminal study of Kim and Bettis (2014) on the positive relationship between firms’ cash holdings and firm value. Theissen et al. (2023) improved on the original Tobin's q measure used to capture firm value and found that—in contrast to the results of Kim and Bettis (2014)–there are not decreasing but increasing returns to holding cash. Separately, Souder et al. (2024) made various methodological improvements and developed a new measure of forward-looking firm value, ultimately finding no relationship between cash holding and value at all. In this article, we combine all methodological refinements made after the original study of Kim and Bettis (2014) into a single analysis. We find that Kim and Bettis’ (2014) original results are correct, despite the numerous limitations of their method.