We study how employment protection laws (EPLs) affect corporate cash-holding decision. By exploiting within-country changes in EPLs across 20 OECD countries as a source of variation in labor adjustment costs, we show that following an increase in the stringency of EPLs, firms' cash holdings increase significantly. This relationship is stronger for firms with high labor turnover, no multinational presence, or financial constraints, indicating that labor adjustment cost raising distress risk is the mechanism in play. Cash buffers created by firms faced with stricter EPLs help them mitigate the underinvestment problem in subsequent episodes of industry-wide distress. Consistent with this precautionary motive, the market's valuation of excess cash is positively associated with the EPL strictness. We further demonstrate that the response of cash policy to changes in EPLs is distinct from that of debt policy or investment policy. Our evidence highlights the role of interaction between labormarket and financial frictions in determining the level and the value of corporate cash.

I show that firms' ability to adjust variable capital in response to productivity shocks has important implications for the interpretation of the widely documented investmentcash flow sensitivities. The variable capital adjustment is sufficient for firms to capture small variations in profitability, but when the revision in profitability is relatively large, limited substitutability between the factors of production may call for fixed capital investment. Hence, firms with lower substitutability are more likely to invest in both factors together and have larger sensitivities of fixed capital investment to cash flow. By building a frictionless capital markets model that allows firms to optimize over fixed capital and inventories as substitutable factors, I establish the significance of the substitutability channel in explaining cross-sectional differences in cash flow sensitivities. Moreover, incorporating variable capital into firms' investment decisions helps explain the sharp decrease in cash flow sensitivities over the past decades. Empirical evidence confirms the model's predictions.ii DEDICATION To Kyung, Jay, and Thea.iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS