A Model for the Determination of Firm Cash Balances

This paper is an attempt to improve on the ability of financial management to arrive at a desirable or close to “optimal” cash balance for a firm at a point in time. There have been several comments on this subject in literature over the years including the contributions of Keynes, Hicks and Samuelson. In recent years Baumol and Beranek have presented us with more specific models. This paper tends to be more operational than the Baumol or Beranek presentations and hence tends perhaps to lose some of the sophistication of the more theoretical models; it attempts to present a reasonably operational method for providing for cash balances for transactions and precautionary purposes. But let us first examine these two models briefly.