We empirically establish that unemployed individuals maintain significant access to credit and that upon a layoff, the unconstrained borrow while the constrained default and delever. Motivated by these findings, we develop a theory of credit lines and labor income risk to analyze optimal transfers to the unemployed. Since credit lines offer fixed interest rates and limits, credit lines are unresponsive to layoffs and provide greater consumption insurance relative to when debt is repriced period by period. At US levels of credit lines, the government can optimally reduce transfers to the unemployed, whereas this is not true when debt is counterfactually repriced period by period.

We study how firms differ from their competitors using new time-varying measures of product similarity based on text-based analysis of firm 10-K product descriptions. This year-by-year set of product similarity measures allows us to generate a new set of industries in which firms can have their own distinct set of competitors. Our new sets of competitors explain specific discussion of high competition, rivals identified by managers as peer firms, and changes to industry competitors following exogenous industry shocks. We also find evidence that firm R&D and advertising are associated with subsequent differentiation from competitors, consistent with theories of endogenous product differentiation.