“Everybody talks about financial innovation, but (almost) nobody empirically tests hypotheses about it” Frame and White (2004).The financial turmoil from 2007 onwards has spurred renewed debates on the “bright” and “dark” sides of financial innovation. Using bank-, industry- and...

Debt capacity creates financial flexibility and collateral-based debt capacity is the least sensitive to cash flow shocks. Using variation in real estate prices as exogenous shocks to corporate financing capacity, we investigate the causal effects of financial flexibility on firms' cash...