Liquidity injections by central banks have become frequent and massive, but their real effects on corporate investment remain unclear. We examine the longer-term refinancing operations (LTROs) of the European Central Bank (ECB) during the eurozone sovereign crisis and show that greater LTRO funding to banks is associated with lower corporate investment. Riskier banks received funds through the LTROs and subsequently increased their holdings of risky sovereign debt. Corporate investment reductions are associated with these banks. Further, concurrent fiscal and regulatory policies impeded the effectiveness of the ECB liquidity injections. Our findings identify the contributing factors for these failures of monetary policy.

Whether and how credit default swaps (CDSs) affect corporate debt structure remains an unanswered question. We find that firms use more public debt relative to bank debt when CDSs referencing their debt start trading. The results are robust to the endogeneity of CDS trading. Furthermore, the increase in public debt is concentrated in senior bonds and notes, which are the most common CDS reference assets. The effect of CDS trading is most pronounced when bond underwriters take a net selling CDS position and for informationally opaque firms. These findings suggest that the hedging and informational roles of CDSs have real effects on corporate debt structure.

We investigate the liquidity management of firms following the inception of credit default swaps (CDS) markets on their debt, which allow hedging and speculative trading on credit risk to be carried out by creditors and other parties. We find that reference firms hold more cash after CDS trading commences on their debt. The increase in cash holdings is more pronounced for CDS firms that do not pay dividends and have a higher marginal value of liquidity. For CDS firms with higher cash flow volatility, these increased cash holdings do not entail higher leverage. Overall, our findings are consistent with the view that CDS-referenced firms adopt more conservative liquidity policies to avoid negotiations with more exacting creditors.

We use credit default swaps (CDS) trading data to demonstrate that the credit risk of reference firms, reflected in rating downgrades and bankruptcies, increases significantly upon the inception of CDS trading, a finding that is robust after controlling for the endogeneity of CDS trading. Additionally, distressed firms are more likely to file for bankruptcy if they are linked to CDS trading. Furthermore, firms with more “no restructuring” contracts than other types of CDS contracts (i.e., contracts that include restructuring) are more adversely affected by CDS trading, and the number of creditors increases after CDS trading begins, exacerbating creditor coordination failure in the resolution of financial distress.

We show that credit default swap (CDS) trading on a firm's debt positively influences its technological innovation output measured by patents and patent citations. This positive effect is more pronounced in firms relying more on debt financing or being more subject to continuous monitoring by lenders prior to CDS trade initiation. Moreover, after CDS trade initiation, firms pursue more risky and original innovations and generate patents with higher economic value. Further analysis suggests that CDSs improve borrowing firms’ innovation output by enhancing lenders’ risk tolerance and borrowers’ risk- taking in the innovation process, rather than by increasing Research and Development (R&D) investment. Taken together, our findings reveal the real effects of CDSs on companies’ investments and technological progress.