Competition in the U.S. appears to have declined. One contributing factor may have been heterogeneity in the availability of credit during the financial crisis. I examine the impact of product market peer credit constraints on long-run competitive outcomes and behavior among non-financial firms. I use measures of lender exposure to the financial crisis to create a plausibly exogenous instrument for product market credit availability. I find that credit constraints of product market peers positively predict growth in sales, market share, profitability, and markups. This is consistent with the notion that firms gained at the expense of their credit constrained peers. The relationship is robust to accounting for other sources of inter-firm spillovers, namely credit access of technology network and supply chain peers. Further, I find evidence of strategic investment, i.e. the idea that firms increase investment in response to peer credit constraints to commit to deter entry mobility. This behavior may explain why temporary heterogeneity in the availability of credit appears to have resulted in a persistent redistribution of output across firms.

We use project-level information for the largest regional economic development program in German history to study how government subsidies to firms affect credit markets. We identify credit market responses by considering both, bank lending and firm borrowing during 1998-2019. We find that subsidies lead to larger lending volumes without crowding out credit to non-subsidized firms. Banks that are more exposed to subsidized firms exhibit moderately higher credit risk though. Firm subsidies support lending especially when credit constraints are elevated during the years of the financial crisis.