We examine the link between bank competition and financial stability using the recent financial crisis as the setting. We utilize variation in banking competition at the state level and find that banks facing less competition are more likely to engage in risky activities, more likely to face regulatory intervention, and more likely to fail. Focusing on the real estate market, we find that states with less competition had higher rates of mortgage approval, experienced greater inflation in housing prices before the crisis, and experienced a steeper decline in housing prices during the crisis. Overall, our study is consistent with greater competition increasing financial stability.

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This study examines the effect of regulatory approval on a firm's voluntary product-level disclosures. We focus on the US biotechnology industry, a setting that allows direct observation of whether firms disclose more information as products proceed through well-defined-though successively more complex and costly-regulatory hurdles. Consistent with predictions motivated by biotech firms' need to repeatedly raise capital, we find that firms disclose more as their products move to later stages in the development process, both when the products receive regulatory approvals as well as when they receive regulatory denials. In addition, these findings are consistent across phases of development as well as product disclosure categories and are accentuated for firms without internal sources of capital (i.e., lacking product revenue). Collectively, these findings reveal that biotechnology firms respond to the considerable incentives to provide enhanced product disclosure and thus facilitate their ongoing need for capital to proceed through subsequent stages of product development.