The interpretation of the correlation between cash flow and investment is controversial. Some argue that it is caused by financial constraints, others by the correlation between cash flow and investment opportunities that are not properly measured by Tobin’s Q. This paper uses UK firms’ contracted capital expenditure to capture information about opportunities available only to insiders and thus not included in Q. When this variable is added to investment regressions, the explanatory power of cash flow falls for large firms, but remains unchanged for small firms. This suggests that the significance of cash flow stems from its role in capturing the effects of credit frictions.

This paper examines the long-standing theory that the growth of small firms is often constrained by the quantity of internal finance. Under plausible assumptions, when financing constraints are binding, an additional dollar of internal finance should generate slightly more than an additional dollar of growth in assets. This quantitative prediction should not hold for the relatively small number of firms which access external equity. We test these predictions with a panel of more than 1, 600 small firms and find that the growth of most firms is constrained by internal finance. Our results have implications for several different research literatures, including models of firm growth.

This study provides new evidence of the importance of financing constraints for explaining the dramatic cycles in inventory investment. We compare the empirical performance of different financial variables (coverage ratio, cash stocks, and cash flow) used in previous research to test for the presence of financing constraints. The comparison is undertaken in a common framework with an identical sample and high-frequency (quarterly) firm panel data. Cash flow is much more successful than cash stocks or coverage in explaining the facts about inventory investment across firm size, different inventory cycles, and different manufacturing sectors.