Crosscountry evidence shows that greater shareholder rights are associated with lower cash holdings (Dittmar, Mahrt-Smith, Servaes, 2003; Lins and Kalcheva, 2004; Pinkowitz, Stulz and Williamson, 2004). This suggests that shareholders want managers to disgorge cash (presumably to the shareholders) and that they force them to do so when they are so empowered.1 In this paper, we hold constant the country-level legal setting and use multiple measures of agency problems within the U.S. to further examine the balance of power between shareholders and managers and how this relates to corporate cash holdings. In addition to providing direct evidence of this relation in the U.S., we argue that our results also bear on the relative importance of country-level protection of rights relative to firm-level restrictions of shareholder power.