Government as Customer of Last Resort: The Stabilizing Effects of Government Purchases on Firms

Jim Goldman and Philip Strahan

The Review of Financial Studies, 2020, vol. 33, issue 2, 610-643

Abstract: I document a beneficial effect of the government’s participation in product markets. Exploiting the 2008–2009 financial crisis as a natural experiment, I show that federal procurement contracts insulated government contractors’ performance from the crisis. By 2009, government contractors had 15% higher market capitalization, had 18% higher capital expenditures, and received 26% more bank credit than did similar firms. This stabilizing effect, in turn, spilled over into neighboring firms. An average amount of government purchases reduced local employment losses by 35% in retail industries and by 48% in industries supplying government contractors. Spillovers were particularly strong in high economic slack areas.Author has furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhz059 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:33:y:2020:i:2:p:610-643.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Financial Studies is currently edited by Itay Goldstein

More articles in The Review of Financial Studies from Society for Financial Studies Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().