Cash is surprisingly valuable as a strategic asset
研究发现现金持有量与企业价值（托宾Q）呈U型关系，且存在规模效应，现金回报远超交易需求，对管理者优化现金策略有参考价值。
Academics, politicians, and journalists are often highly critical of U.S . firms for holding too much cash. Cash holdings are stockpiled free‐cash flow and incur substantial opportunity costs from the perspectives of economics. However, behavioral theory highlights the benefits of cash holdings as fungible slack resources facilitating adaptive advantages. We use the countervailing forces embodied in these two theories to hypothesize and test a quadratic functional relationship of returns to cash measured by T obin's q. We also build and test a related novel hypothesis of scale‐dependent returns to cash based on the competitive strategy concept of strategic deterrence. Tests for both of these hypotheses are positive and show that returns to cash continue to increase far beyond transactional needs . Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.