Bank concentration, credit access, and corporate cash holdings

We examine how bank concentration affects corporate cash holdings through firms’ access to external financing. Using a panel of U.S. public firms from 1994 to 2017, we show that higher bank concentration reduces firms’ access to bank credit, leading to higher precautionary cash holdings. Employing a structural equation modeling approach, we document a significant mediation effect of credit access, consistent with the bank market power hypothesis. The effect strengthens following the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, suggesting that changes in the banking structure amplify the transmission of financial constraints to corporate liquidity policies. Cross-sectional evidence indicates that the effect is more pronounced among financially constrained, non-NYSE, and high-intangible firms. Our findings highlight a key channel through which banking market structure influences corporate financial policies, linking bank concentration to firms’ liquidity management via credit supply conditions.