We use variation in real estate prices as exogenous shocks to firms’ debt capacity to study the causal effect of financial flexibility on payout policy. We show that an increase in financial flexibility results in higher dividends, share repurchases, and payout flexibility. We find that a 1-standard-deviation increase in a firms’ collateral value results in 0.26- and 0.55-percentage-point increases in nondiscretionary and discretionary payouts, respectively. This effect is stronger for firms with few investment opportunities. Moreover, highly leveraged firms are more likely to cut dividends in response to a sharp decrease in their financial flexibility.

We develop a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing, in which shocks to the value of collateralizable assets generate variation in firms’ debt capacity. We show that the degree of similarity among firms’ financial flexibility forecasts cross-sectional variation in return correlation. We test the implications of the model with firm-level data in two empirical analyses using i) an instrumental variable approach based on shocks to the value of collateralizable corporate assets and ii) the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis as an event study. We find that firms in the same percentile of the cross-sectional distribution of financial flexibility have 62% higher correlation in stock-return residuals than firms 50 percentiles apart.