Title: Three Essays in Empirical Corporate Finance
Description: This dissertation presents three essays in empirical corporate finance. The essays discuss how financial markets affect the real economy. The first essay studies how a change in credit supply affects firms’ decisions to create new products or destroy the existing ones. It provides reduced form causal evidence that a reduction in credit supply reduces product creation substantially. The second essay studies the effect of less product creation on consumer welfare. I find that the effect on consumer welfare is smaller relative to a “naive” interpretation of the reduced form estimate, due to equilibrium responses. The third essay studies how financially constrained firms reduce total investment costs. It provides suggestive evidence that when reducing total investment cost, they do so by lowering the expansion of output capacity and choosing cheaper investment options.