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Baumol Model Of Cash Management

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It was developed by William J. Baumol. The model helps determine a firm’s optimum cash balance under certainty. It is used for cash management. The model helps firms determine the optimum cash balances that they can keep by considering costs. The costs involved are holding costs (opportunity costs) and the transactional costs.
Transactional costs are the costs incurred when changing between marketable security and cash. Holding costs are costs incurred when keeping cash. Opportunity costs are the costs incurred when the firm chooses to keep cash instead of buying securities. It is also known as interest rate because it is the interest rate that are foregone by the firm by not investing in marketable securities.
Just like all most model, the Baumol model works with assumptions. The first assumption is that the firm must be able to forecast its cash requirements and receive a specific flow of cash at regular intervals. Its cash flows must be certain. The other assumption is that the firm must be able to change to change the securities that it owns into cash keeping the variable and fixed costs of transactions the same. The firm must also be aware of it opportunity cost when holding cash. The opportunity cost should stay constant for a long period of time.
The model works like this. A firm …show more content…

The upper limit and the lower limit. The buying and selling of marketable securities will be done to keep the balance in range. A maximum amount may also be specified to reflect the trade-off between the transaction cost of investing in liquid assets and cost of lost interest if the cash is not invested. The lower limit is set by the firm based on the desired minimum safety stock of cash in hand. The firm must be able to determine the interest rate, for marketable securities (i), the fixed transaction cost for trading in securities (c), the standard definition if its daily cash

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