“…This negative relationship for the US firms is due to active shareholders' monitoring mechanism, effective regulations, less gap of information asymmetries as well as due to the occurrence of the global turbulence in economic conditions over our sample period, such as the GFC, the pandemic diseases in 2010-2011 (H1N1 and Bird flu) (Al-Shboul et al, 2021) and the oil crash crisis between 2014 and 2016 (Al-Shboul and Alsharari, 2019). However, our findings contradict the results of other studies (Herlambang et al, 2017;Faradisi and Ulpah, 2021;Jiang et al, 2017;Nguyen, 2020;Hu et al, 2020) who used datasets from different countries (China, Indonesia and Australia). The difference between our results and the findings of these studies would be due to the following conditions govern firms in other countries, such as the absence of effective shareholders' monitoring policies, creditors substitute hypothesis, ineffective stock trading regulations and the lack of governance as insiders might exerts holding back the cash flows for their own benefits.…”