We examine the impact of undervaluation on a firm's use of trade credit. To address potential endogeneity bias, we construct our instrumental variable based on mutual fund outflow-driven price pressure, and our undervaluation measure allows us to distinguish misvaluation from fair valuation. We find that a firm's suppliers play an important role in providing temporary bridge financing when the firm is undervalued. The effect varies with the firm's information environment and with its dependence on external finance. In addition, based on a manually matched supplier-customer sample, we show that small customers in long-term relationships with their suppliers are more likely to obtain trade credit when facing stock market undervaluation, while small suppliers with a smaller customer pool extend more trade credit to their undervalued customers.

We measure how cuts to public procurement propagate through the banking system in a financial crisis. During the European sovereign debt crisis, the Portuguese government cut procurement spending by 4.3 percent of GDP. We find that this cut saddled banks with nonperforming loans from government contractors, which led to a persistent reduction in credit supply to other firms. We estimate a bank-level elasticity of credit supply with respect to procurement demand of 2.5. In a general equilibrium model, our findings point to large effects of fiscal policy on credit supply and output in a crisis.