More than a decade of historically low interest rates has prompted companies to go on a borrowing binge. Although there's no sign of a debt bubble right now, market watchers are increasingly concerned about corporate indebtedness.

No surprise there. Excluding financial companies, U.S. corporate debt is at a record high.

Companies carrying excess debt are more vulnerable to rising interest rates, a global economic slowdown or an outright recession. Conversely, companies with more Benjamins in the bank than IOUs are fortified against many financial headwinds.

Large-cap dividend stocks can be a redoubt in times of market volatility. If they have rock-solid balance sheets and generate gushers of cash, so much the better.

We searched the major indexes for dividend payers with market values of at least $10 billion that have more cash on their balance sheets than total debt. And because dividends and interest payments come from free cash flow, we also limited ourselves to companies with ample FCF after paying interest on debt.

The result: Fewer than two dozen large-cap dividend stocks across all the large publicly traded companies in the U.S. Here, we look at 20 of the best.

Nvidia

Trade-sensitive semiconductor stocks such as Nvidia (NVDA, $195.09) have been volatile this year as the market rises and falls with every move in the U.S.-China trade spat.

Be that as it may, Nvidia shares have managed to outpace the S&P 500 by a wide margin so far in 2019, thanks to continued growth in gaming and artificial intelligence.

And it's just warming up, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which rates shares at Buy. "(Nvidia's) data center growth is on the cusp of benefiting from the next-big (artificial intelligence) landmark - the ability to accurately listen, understand, speak and contextualize human speech," Merrill Lynch analysts say.

Nvidia is in a strong financial situation, with $8.5 billion in cash countering its $2.6 billion in debt several times over. And although Nvidia is hardly the highest-yielding name in the universe of dividend stocks, it has ample resources to continue to raise it. The company currently is only paying out 14% of its profits as distributions to shareholders.

Activision Blizzard

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Speaking of gaming, Activision Blizzard (, $54.80), perhaps best-known for the Call of Duty franchise, is another large-cap dividend payer with a more-than-solid balance sheet.