Almeida, Campello, and Weisbach (2004) and Riddick and Whited (2009) offer contrasting conclusions regarding the corporate cash flow sensitivity of cash. We use an augmented empirical model to affirm the conclusion in Riddick and Whited that the cash flow sensitivity of cash is generally negative. In addition, we contend that the cash flow sensitivity of cash is asymmetric to cash flow. The asymmetry may be due to several reasons, including binding project contracts, bad news withholding, and agency costs. Using a sample of manufacturing firms from 1972 to 2006, we document that the cash flow sensitivity of cash is negative when a firm faces a positive cash flow environment, supporting Riddick and Whited (2009), but the cash flow sensitivity of cash is positive when a firm faces negative cash flows. We further divide firms into financially constrained and unconstrained ones and find that the cash flow sensitivity of cash asymmetry continues to hold in both groups. When we use institutional holding as a control for the agency problem, we find that firms with better outside monitoring dissave to capture good investment opportunities. All the results support our hypotheses that firms have different levels of responses to their cash holdings when facing positive and negative cash flows.

We conceptualize equity incentive contracting as a dynamic process in which contracting frictions limit the speed at which equity incentives adjust to target levels. Slower adjustment speeds imply more prolonged deviations from value-maximizing targets and thus more severe negative effects on future performance. We find that contracting frictions significantly slow the speed of adjustment to target incentives (SOA). Consistent with frictions prolonging the persistence of deviations from target, we find that contracting frictions magnify the negative influence of deviations on future firm performance. Further, we find that the influence of contracting frictions on SOA operates through boards’ equity grant decisions. Our dynamic contracting perspective offers new insight into the relation between CEO incentives and firm performance by providing novel evidence that the speed of convergence to target incentives is a defining feature of the dynamic contracting process that translates inefficiency effects of contracting frictions into lower future performance. Data Availability: All data are publicly available from sources indicated in the text.

We examine the relation between political uncertainty and narrative disclosure complexity in conference calls. Using firm-level political uncertainty, we find that political uncertainty is positively associated with firms’ disclosures complexity as measured by the Fog index. Decomposing complexity into two latent components—information and obfuscation—we show that political uncertainty significantly increases the obfuscation but has no impact on the information. Further analysis reveals that complex disclosure is motivated by expected poor future performance amid political uncertainty. We also show that, during periods of heightened political uncertainty, obfuscated disclosure is associated with reduced earnings informativeness, increased dispersion in analyst forecasts, and higher volatility in forecast revisions. These findings are robust to including and excluding sentences containing complex political bigrams when calculating Fog. Further evidence shows that, during periods of political uncertainty, managers tend to use a more ambiguous tone and provide scripted and shorter (longer) responses to analysts’ questions (presentations).