Search Results
Discussion Paper
Small business use of credit cards in the U.S. market
America?s small businesses have adopted credit cards as both a payment method and a borrowing vehicle. The segment also uses other payment card products, including debit, charge, and prepaid cards. The dollar volume of spending with cards designed for small businesses increased by 230 percent over the five-year period from 2003-2008. But the recession of 2007-2009 and contemporaneous changes in the regulatory environment had effects on both the supply to and demand of small businesses with respect to credit cards. To obtain an update on these issues, the Payment Cards Center hosted a workshop ...
Working Paper
Internal capital markets and investment: do the cash flow constraints really bind?
Lamont (1997) claims to find evidence of credit market imperfections that distort financing and investment decisions of a sample of oil-dependent firms, as investment by non-oil units fell when oil cash flow dropped. However, a simple test reveals that few of these firms behaved in a fashion consistent with binding cash flow constraints. In addition, most were cash rich. The data provide strong evidence against the hypothesis that investment decisions by non-oil units were significantly affected by oil cash flow, or that credit market imperfections are an important factor for this set of ...
Journal Article
Why are corporations holding so much cash?
U.S. corporations are holding record-high amounts of cash. One reason has to do with taxes?both the uncertainty about future taxes and the reality of today?s tax rules. The second reason has to do with the rise of research and development; because of its uncertain nature, this sort of work requires access to high levels of cash.
Conference Paper
International comparisons: lessons learned
Newsletter
Corporate Cash Flow and Its Uses
We decompose corporate cash flow into its primary components to examine how funds are being internally allocated and to elucidate current trends in corporate behavior. By historical standards, capital investment has been low and shareholder payouts have been high over the past few years, although these patterns do not seem so abnormal once recent economic and financial conditions are factored in. That said, corporate debt levels are now somewhat higher than we would expect given the rather tepid economic recovery from the Great Recession.
Working Paper
Does firm value move too much to be justified by subsequent changes in cash flow?
Movements in the value of corporate assets are justified by changes in expected future cash flow. The appropriate measure of cash flow for valuing assets is net payout, which is the sum of dividends, interest, and net repurchases of equity and debt. When discount rates are low and equity issuance is high, expected cash-flow growth is low because firms repurchase debt to offset equity issuance. A variance decomposition of the ratio of net payout reveals little transitory variation in discount rates that is not offset by common variation with expected cashflow growth.
Journal Article
Shopping without cash: the emergence of the e-purse
This article finds that successful e-purse programs tend to have a captive audience that drives critical mass, such as those found in the transportation industry or government sector; an affordable cost structure relative to other payment instruments; compelling incentives for consumers and merchants; and technology that is well tested and addresses standards issues before rollout.
Working Paper
Debit card and cash usage: a cross-country analysis
During the last decade, debit card transactions grew rapidly in most advanced countries. While check usage declined and has almost disappeared in some countries, the stock of currency in circulation has not declined as fast. We use panel estimation techniques to analyze the change in transactional demand for cash resulting from greater usage of debit cards in 13 countries from 1988 to 2003. We are able to disentangle cash?s store of value function from its payment function by separating cash into three denomination categories. We find that the demand for low denomination notes and coins ...