We show that a bank's knowledge of an industry developed through its loan portfolio facilitates the bank's credit provision to other firms in that industry. This effect works beyond the bank's private information about the focal firm and is consistent with a cross information production where experience with other firms from a similar background reduces information asymmetry on the firm concerned. To tackle endogeneity, we develop an instrument for a bank's expertise in an industry based on historical, natural, and regulatory conditions. We provide further evidence using the 2007 housing market crash as a laboratory. We find that banks hit by the shock rebalance loan allocations to buffer borrowers in their expertise industries from a credit crunch. The effect of industry expertise is more pronounced for opaque firms and firms facing foreign competition pressure. Our findings suggest a spillover effect or economies of scale in banks’ information production. It helps explain the cost efficiency of financial intermediaries relative to direct lending and why, beyond relationship considerations, firms may prefer some banks over others.

We show that firms grow faster than their industry rivals if there are credit default swaps (CDS) referencing their debt. Using multiple approaches to addressing endogeneity concerns including synthetic difference-in-differences and novel instrumental variables, we find the product market effects of CDS likely to be causal. We provide evidence for two mechanisms driving the CDS effects: the reduction of creditor monitoring and the elevation of shareholder risk-taking. A detailed analysis of product market dynamics reveals that CDS firms achieve faster growth by reducing markups, developing new products, and encroaching on rivals' product space. Over the long run, these strategies increase industry concentration and help profitability growth. Consistent with the classic predation theories, our findings suggest that financial innovations that change incentive problems in financial contracting can have real effects on product market outcomes.

We examine interactions between investment and financing decisions in a dynamic model where the firm can alter the mix of debt and equity financing and exercise a randomly arriving and potentially short lived growth option. The firm will typically finance the exercise of the growth option with equity and may wait years before recapitalizing to a higher debt level. The lack of coordination between the timing of investment and debt financing helps explain a number of findings in the empirical literature, including violation of the financing pecking order, debt conservatism, apparent market timing of security issues, and more pronounced underperformance following equity issues than debt issues.