Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Is Cash-Return Relation Risk Induced?, Chenxi Liu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Corporate cash holding is found to be able to predict stock return. Some scholars attribute this to the association of cash with systematic risk with respect to growth options. Others find that the relation is a mispricing effect. In this paper, I try to test whether the relation between cash and return is driven by systematic risk that captured by cash. The empirical results do not support the risk explanation of cash-return relation. First, the risk loading on CASH factor cannot predict returns, which is not consistent with rational frictionless asset pricing models. Second, CASH factor cannot reflect future GDP …