Current assets, by accounting definition, are assets normally converted
into cash within one year. Working capital management usually is considered
to involve the administration of these assets—namely, cash and
marketable securities, receivables, and inventories—and the administration
of current liabilities. Administration of fixed assets (assets normally
not converted into cash within the year), on the other hand, is usually
considered to fall within the realm of capital budgeting, which we took
up in Part II. We noted there, however, that many capital-budgeting
projects involve investment in current assets. In our treatment, this
investment was considered in relation to the specific project under capital
budgeting and not under working capital management. In this part, we
are concerned with the investment in current assets as a whole and their
composition. By and large, investment in current assets is more divisible
than investment in fixed assets, a fact that has important implications for
flexibility in financing. Differences in divisibility as well as in durability
of economic life are the essential features that distinguish current from
fixed assets.
Determining the appropriate levels of current assets and current liabilities,
which determine the level of working capital, involves fundamental
decisions with respect to the firm’s liquidity and the maturity
composition of its debt.1 In turn, these decisions are influenced by a
tradeoff between profitability and risk. In a broad sense, the appropriate
decision variable to examine on the asset side of the balance sheet is the
maturity composition, or liquidity, of the firm’s assets—i.e., the turnover
of these assets into cash. Decisions that affect the asset liquidity of the
firm include: the management of cash and marketable securities; credit
policy and procedures; inventory management and control; and the administration
of fixed assets. For purposes of illustration, we hold constant
the last three factors; the efficiency in managing them is taken up elsewhere
in the book.2 We assume also that the cash and marketable securities
held by the firm (hereafter called liquid assets) yield a return lower
than the return on investment in other assets.
For current assets, then, the lower the proportion of liquid assets to
total assets, the greater the firm’s return on total investment. Profitability
with respect to the level of current liabilities relates to differences
in costs between various methods of financing and to the use of financing
during periods when it is not needed. To the extent that the explicit costs
of short-term financing are less than those of intermediate- and long-term
financing, the greater the proportion of short-term debt to total debt, the