Resumo

To elucidate the issue of cash reserves, several studies were conducted to identify the determinants and implications of this variable in companies, which discuss the reasons that made the American companies to retain more cash. However, these studies predated the financial crisis of 2008, leaving a gap on the behavior of this variable. This phenomenon was identified in Brazilian companies analyzing historical data on cash retention and there was a rise in the pre-crisis period, reaching its apex in 2009. However, there is still doubt as to why companies continue to retain less cash.

Considering the scenario pointed out about the decrease in cash retention in Brazilian companies between 2010 and 2015, this article aims at analyzing the determinants of this phenomenon through the literature presuppositions related to the transaction, speculation, precaution, taxes and governance problems.

Theories that deal with the trade-off between the costs and benefits of maintaining cash may make it possible to identify the reasons that make a company hold a great amount of cash from the perspective of maximizing shareholder wealth. However, different points of view focus on this issue as directors and shareholders view the costs and benefits of holding net assets differently, thus generating insights about the advantage of having liquid balances.

The sample is composed by 144 Brazilian publicly traded companies with stock in BM&FBOVESPA from 2010 to 2015. These firms represent a total of 864 observations and the data were collected in Economática. The data analysis is divided into two parts. The first is the analysis of the historical data of the companies' cash in order to verify if there were increase or decrease in the retention of cash. The second part consists in the methodology proposed by Hansen (1999) that deals with the application of data in panel with threshold. The data were analyzed with Stata 14 and R.

As a result, it was identified that transactions and taxes were the main reasons for reducing retention of cash for smaller companies. However, the reasons related to the precaution for bigger companies and to the problems of governance for smaller companies, presented a positive relation with the variation of the cash. The empirical gain in the conduction of the analysis from the threshold methodology is evidenced, since it allowed the analysis of the coefficients in different regimes, surpassing the analysis of coefficients that were analyzed as if they were identical.

The result shows that transactions and taxation are the main reasons to the decrease in a cash retention for smaller firms. However, the reason related to precautionary to bigger firms and the governance problems to smaller firms showed positive relation to the cash variation.

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