This paper studies the rise of direct lending using a comprehensive dataset of investments by business development companies (BDC). We exploit three exogenous shocks to credit supply, including new banking regulations and a major finance company collapse, to establish that BDC capital acts as a substitute for traditional financing. Using firm-level data, we further document that firms’ access to BDC funding stimulates their employment growth and patenting activity. Beyond credit provision, BDCs contribute to firm growth through managerial assistance.

Using the exclusion of business development companies (BDCs) from stock indexes, this paper studies the effectiveness of market discipline in the direct lending space. Amid share sell-offs by institutional investors, a drop in BDCs’ valuations limits their ability to raise new equity capital. Following this funding shock, BDCs do not adjust their capital structure. At the same time, they are reducing the risk exposure of their portfolios. We document a greater reduction in risk for BDCs subject to stronger market discipline from their debtholders. BDCs pass through the capital shock to their portfolio firms by reducing their investment intensity.

In this paper, we consider conditional measures of lead-lag relations between aggregate growth and industry-level cash flow growth in the United States. Our results show that firms in leading industries pay an average annualized return 3.6 higher than that of firms in lagging industries. Using both time-series and cross-sectional tests, we estimate an annual pure timing premium ranging from 1.2 to 1.7. This finding can be rationalized in a model in which (a) agents price growth news shocks, and (b) leading industries provide valuable resolution of uncertainty about the growth prospects of lagging industries.