We examine the holdings of cash and cash equivalents of 156 Swiss non-financial firms over the 1995 to 2004 period. A main result of our analysis is that the median Swiss firm has substantially higher cash reserves than firms from most other countries. We also observe significant influences from various firm-specific variables on cash holdings, and our findings support several hypotheses derived from theory. According to the transaction costs motive, firms face a trade-off between the costs and benefits of holding cash. The strong negative relationship between asset tangibility
and the cash ratio indicates that firms with assets that can easily be liquidated accumulate less cash to minimize the opportunity costs of liquidity. The observation that firms with higher leverage tend to hold less cash supports the idea that the opportunity costs of holding cash increase with leverage. In addition, we find some evidence
for the hypothesis that large firms hold less cash due to economies of scale in security issuances.