Entry requires external finance, especially for less wealthy entrepreneurs, so poor investor protection limits competition. We model how incumbents lobby harder to block access to finance to entrants when politicians are less accountable to voters. In a broad cross-section of countries and...

In this paper, we analyze the interaction between an incumbent firm's financial contract with abank and its product market decisions in the face of the threat of entry, in a dynamic model.The main results of the paper are: there exists a separating equilibrium with no limit pricing; thelow-cost...

We use project-level information for the largest regional economic development program in German history to study whether government subsidies to firms affect quantity and quality of bank lending. We combine recipient firms under the Improvement of Regional Economic Structures program (GRW) with...