School of Law and Business, Sanjiang University, Nanjing, China.
School of Management Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China.
PLoS One. 2023 Nov 22;18(11):e0293306. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293306. eCollection 2023.
Cash holding is an important strategic decision of enterprises. As a macro-level factor, economic policy uncertainty causes risks, affecting enterprises' cash holdings. Taking the quarterly financial data of China's A-share non-financial listed firms for 2010-2020 as a sample, this study adopts the OLS and fixed effect models to investigate how corporate cash holdings are affected by economic policy uncertainty. The findings indicate that economic policy uncertainty is directly proportional to the level of cash that listed corporations hold. The higher the uncertainty, the more cash the company holds. Among them, state-owned enterprises and the manufacturing industry are more significantly affected by economic policy uncertainty. Finally, considering the regional marketization level and the differences in financing constraints enterprises face, it is concluded through grouping empirical studies that enterprises located in regions with lower marketization levels are more susceptible to policy uncertainty, while financially constrained enterprises are more susceptible to economic policy uncertainty. The study of economic policy uncertainty is helpful to guide enterprises to realize the importance of coping strategies in advance under the background of intensifying economic policy uncertainty. Therefore, this paper proposes to introduce policies on the premise of fully considering the smoothness of the economy and the differences in the conditions of firms of different natures, as well as some proposals to alleviate financing constraints, reduce the adverse effects of uncertainty on firms, and bolster the marketization process.
现金持有是企业的一项重要战略决策。经济政策不确定性作为一种宏观层面的因素，会引发风险，影响企业的现金持有。本文以 2010-2020 年中国 A 股非金融上市公司的季度财务数据为样本，采用 OLS 和固定效应模型，考察了企业现金持有如何受到经济政策不确定性的影响。研究结果表明，经济政策不确定性与上市公司现金持有水平成正比。不确定性越高，公司持有的现金就越多。其中，国有企业和制造业受经济政策不确定性的影响更为显著。最后，考虑到地区市场化水平和企业面临的融资约束差异，通过分组实证研究得出结论，处于市场化水平较低地区的企业更容易受到政策不确定性的影响，而面临融资约束的企业更容易受到经济政策不确定性的影响。对经济政策不确定性的研究有助于引导企业在经济政策不确定性加剧的背景下提前认识到应对策略的重要性。因此，本文提出在充分考虑经济平稳性和不同性质企业条件差异的前提下，引入政策，并提出一些缓解融资约束、降低不确定性对企业不利影响、推动市场化进程的建议。
