دارایی های نقدی و کیفیت سود: بازار بریتانیا Cash holdings and earnings quality: evidence from the Main and Alternative UK markets

1. Introduction and motivation Prior research has shown that companies may set their levels of cash holdings by trading off the costs and benefits of larger liquidity reserves (Miller & Orr, 1966). Costs that have been analysed typically include low returns and possible tax disadvantages of cash reserves (Bigelli & Sánchez-Vidal, 2012) while usual benefits that have been identified are the reduction in transaction costs that would exist in the case of new capital raising or the liquidation of assets, the reduced likelihood of default, the avoidance of possibly expensive funding or even the shortage of financing alternatives (Kim, Mauer, & Sherman, 1998; Opler, Pinkowitz, Stulz, & Williamson, 1999). Reasons for a costly external financing relate in general to the presence of information asymmetries between firms and investors (Myers & Majluf, 1984) or to the existence of agency problems associated with underinvestment and asset substitution (Jensen & Meckling, 1976). Additionally, managers may pursue their own interests by maintaining large amounts of cash on companies’ balance sheets so as to keep sub-optimal levels of net debt, risk and/or dividends in comparison to those desired by shareholders (Easterbrook, 1984). With the exception of García-Teruel, Martínez-Solano, and SánchezBallesta (2009) who focused on Spanish firms prior to the adoption of IFRS by listed business groups, there has been, however, little research on the relation between cash reserves and earnings quality in an European setting. In the US context, Sun, Yung, and Rahman (2012) show a negative impact of earnings quality on corporate cash holdings. Chung, Kim, Kim, and Zhang (2015) document that companies in industries with greater levels of information asymmetry hold lower amounts of cash balances, consistent with a shareholders monitoring hypothesis where managers are restrained from holding large cash reserves that could be misused when their environment is more opaque. The UK is a particularly interesting setting to test the relationship between earnings quality and cash-holdings. This is not just due to earnings quality being usually perceived to be higher in Anglo-Saxon (common-law) accounting systems than in continental Europe (code-law) ones but also because, as Ball, Kothari, and Robin (2000) observe, “within the common-law group, there is less asymmetric conservatism in accounting income in the United Kingdom, a country we characterize in terms of lower political involvement in accounting, lower litigation costs and less issuance of public debt” (p. 4).