This paper investigates the empirical determinants of corporate cash holdings for a sample of UK firms. We focus on the importance of managerial ownership among other corporate governance characteristics including board structure and ultimate controllers of companies. We present evidence of a significant non-monotonic relation between managerial ownership and cash holdings. In addition, we observe that the way in which managerial ownership exerts influence on cash holdings does not change with board composition and, in general, the presence of ultimate controllers. The results reveal that firms' growth opportunities, cash flows, liquid assets, leverage and bank debt are important in determining cash holdings. Our analysis also suggests that firm heterogeneity and endogeneity are crucial in analysing the cash structure of firms.

This study investigates whether board gender diversity matters in banks' initial responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in supporting their customers, communities and governments. We construct a unique and comprehensive COVID-19 Bank Response Measure (C19BRM) by compiling a novel hand-collected dataset on supportive measures announced by US and European banks during the first wave of the pandemic. We find that banks with higher board representation of women directors supported their customers and communities more. Our findings also reveal that banks with more women on the boards increased their charity and donations. Our results are robust to the potential self-selection bias of women choosing to join boards of more responsible banks, the omitted variables bias, and alternative measures of gender diversity.