We explore how business groups use internal labour markets (ILMs) in response to changing economic conditions. We show that following the exit of a large industry competitor, group-affiliated firms expand, and gain market share by increasing their reliance on the ILM to ensure swift hiring, especially of technical managers and skilled blue collar workers. The ability to take advantage of this shock to growth opportunities is greater in firms with closer access to their affiliates’ human capital, as geographical proximity facilitates employee relocations across units. Overall, our findings point to the ILM as a prominent mechanism making affiliation with a business group valuable at times of change. For the ILM to perform its role in the face of industry shocks, group sectoral diversification must be combined with geographical proximity between affiliates.

We provide evidence that incumbent and entrant firms' access to business group deep pockets affects the entry patterns in product markets. Relying on a unique French data set on business groups, our paper shows that entry into manufacturing industries is negatively related to the cash hoarded by incumbent affiliated groups and positively related to entrant groups' cash. In line with theoretical predictions, we find that the impact of group cash holdingson entry is more important in environments where financial constraints are pronounced. The cash holdings of incumbent and entrant groups also affect the survival rate of entrants in the three- to five-year post-entry window. Overall, our findings suggest that internal capital markets operate within corporate groups and affect the product market behavior of affiliated firms by mitigating financial constraints.