We conduct one final investigation (but do not report the results in a table) to identify whether agency problems can explain the increase in cash holdings. In a given year, we expect firms with high excess cash, defined as firms with a high residual in the cross-sectional regression, to be more likely to have high agency problems. For agency problems to explain the growth in cash holdings, these firms should experience higher growth in cash holdings relative to firms with low excess cash. We investigate this possibility as follows. Every 5 years, we rank firms according to their excess cash using the residuals from the cross-sectional regression estimated using parameters from the modified OPSW model discussed in Section V. We then estimate the growth in cash holdings over the next 5 years for the average and median firms in each excess cash quintile. We find that for each quintile, there is a negative relation between the excess cash and the growth rate of the cash ratio. This result is inconsistent with an agency explanation for the increase in cash holdings over time.