The dramatic increase in the percentage of mutual funds lending equities suggests that lending fees are an increasingly important source of income for investment advisors. We find that funds that lend equities underperform otherwise similar funds in spite of lending income. The effect of lending is concentrated in funds that cannot act on the short-selling signal due investment restrictions set by the fund family to diversify their fund offerings across styles. Our findings suggest that the family organization explains why fund managers lend, rather than sell, stocks with short selling demand.

We show that municipalities’ financial constraints can have a significant impact on local employment and growth. We identify these effects by exploiting exogenous upgrades in U.S. municipal bond ratings caused by Moody’s recalibration of its ratings scale in 2010. We find that local governments increase expenditures because their debt capacity expands following a rating upgrade. These expenditures have an estimated local income multiplier of 1.9 and a cost per job of $20,000 per year. Our findings suggest that debt-financed increases in government spending can improve economic conditions during recessions.

We show that sovereign debt impairments can have a significant effect on financial markets and real economies through a credit ratings channel. Specifically, we find that firms reduce their investment and reliance on credit markets due to a rising cost of debt capital following a sovereign rating downgrade. We identify these effects by exploiting exogenous variation in corporate ratings due to rating agencies' sovereign ceiling policies, which require that firms' ratings remain at or below the sovereign rating of their country of domicile.