Cash Holdings, Costly Financing and the Q Theory of Returns

I add cash holdings into an investment-based model of stock returns. I motivate cash holdings via costly outside financing. The model shows a relation between stock returns and cash holdings and provides a structural foundation for estimating the value of cash holdings from regressions. I estimate the model at the firm level-a task notoriously difficult for q theoretic models. Adding cash into the model substantially improves model fit on average, and accounting for costly investment and financing help improve fit across firms.