Cash holdings and corruption prevention commitment: Evidence from the UK

Abstract

This study advances the literature in cash holdings in that it empirically examines the impact of corruption prevention commitment (CPC) on the cash holding strategic decisions and how such CPC might interact with cash holdings to affect firm value. We employ a sample of UK non-financial publicly listed firms and our results are of twofold. First, we detect a significant negative relationship between CPC and cash holdings, which is consistent with the expected governance effect of CPC. Second, we find a negative interaction of CPC with cash holdings when investigating cash holdings effect on firm value, suggesting that shareholders consider CPC as an overinvestment in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity within a strong customer protection framework, such as the UK. Our findings are robust to different econometric estimations and controlling for different explanatory variables. This study offers beneficial perceptions into the notion of sustainability and sustainability standards and their implications on firms financing decisions. Finally, we argue that while this paper investigates the UK context, our results might be applicable to other countries with similar anti-corruption structure as in the UK.