Coming full circle on cash holdings and firm value: A comment on Kim and Bettis (2014), Theissen et al. (2023), and Souder et al. (2024)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In their recent article, Theissen et al. (2023) re-examined the seminal study of Kim and Bettis (2014) on the positive relationship between firms’ cash holdings and firm value. Theissen et al. (2023) improved on the original Tobin's q measure used to capture firm value and found that—in contrast to the results of Kim and Bettis (2014) –there are not decreasing but increasing returns to holding cash. Separately, Souder et al. (2024) made various methodological improvements and developed a new measure of forward-looking firm value, ultimately finding no relationship between cash holding and value at all. In this article, we combine all methodological refinements made after the original study of Kim and Bettis (2014) into a single analysis. We find that Kim and Bettis’ (2014) original results are correct, despite the numerous limitations of their method.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it