This paper contrasts the investment behavior of different financial institutions in debt securities as a response to past returns. For identification, I use unique security-level data from the German Microdatabase Securities Holdings Statistics. Banks and investment funds respond in a procyclical manner to past security-specific holding period returns. In contrast, insurance companies and pension funds act countercyclically; they buy when returns have been negative and sell after high returns. The heterogeneous responses can be explained by differences in their balance sheet structure. I exploit within-sector variation in the financial constraint to show that tighter constraints are associated with relatively more procyclical investment behavior.

We study the interaction of expansionary rate-based monetary policy and quantitative easing, despite their concurrent implementation, by exploiting heterogeneous banks and the introduction of negative monetary-policy rates in a fragmented euro area. Quantitative easing increases credit supply less when banks’ funding costs do not decrease simultaneously. Using administrative data from Germany, we uncover that among banks selling their securities, central-bank reserves remain disproportionately with high-deposit banks that are constrained due to sticky customer deposits at the zero lower bound. Affected German banks lend relatively less to firms while increasing their interbank exposure in the euro area.

We study the role of financial frictions for productivity. Using a rich cross-country firm-level data, we exploit variation in preexisting exposure to the 2008 global financial crisis to study the post-crisis productivity slowdown. Firms with weaker precrisis balance sheets experienced a highly persistent decline in post-crisis total factor productivity growth relative to their less vulnerable counterparts, accounting for about one-third of the within-firm productivity slowdown. This decline was larger for firms that faced a more severe tightening of credit conditions. Financially fragile firms cut back on innovation activities, one channel through which financial frictions weakened post-crisis productivity growth.