This paper uses international panel data to examine the interrelationships among some commonly used measures of financial constraint. The analysis reveals the following insights: (1) firms with stronger financial positions are more investment-cash flow sensitive than firms with weaker financial positions even after controlling for size and dividend payout and (2) higher payout firms are more investment-cash flow sensitive than lower payout firms even after controlling for size and financial strength. Evidence regarding the impact of firm size that is documented originally becomes much weaker once financial health and dividend payout behavior are controlled for. Finally, additional analysis reveals that many of these results may be driven by the fact that firms possessing high cash flow volatility display lower investment-cash flow sensitivities.

We examine the failures of 132 U.S. banks over the 2002–2009 period using discriminant analysis and successfully distinguish between banks that failed and those that didn’t 92% of the time using in-sample quarterly data. Our two most important variables are related to bank capital and loan quality, as one might expect; although bank profitability is also important. The resulting model is then used out-of-sample to examine the failure of 191 banks during 2010–11, with predictive accuracy in the 90–95% range. Our results demonstrate that our model can also easily be applied to a large number of firms (even those that don’t fail) and does an excellent job of distinguishing healthy from distressed banks. Combining this effectiveness with its ease of implementation makes it very functional. Such a model should be of obvious interest to regulators, analysts, and all those with a direct interest in assessing bank financial health.

This paper examines the relevance of institutional investors’ investment horizon, as reflected in the response of firm investment to internal cash flows. We argue that institutional investors with longer investment horizons have greater incentives and efficiencies to engage in effective monitoring. This improved monitoring mitigates asymmetric information and agency problems, and in turn reduces the wedge between the costs of internal and external funds. As a result, the sensitivity of firms’ investment outlays to internal cash flows decreases in the presence of institutional investors with long-term investment horizons. Using a sample of 8402 US firms over the period 1981–2008, we provide empirical evidence consistent with these arguments.