Financing Decisions and New Product Introductions of Private and Publicly Traded Firms Gordon Phillips Giorgo Sertsios This version: March 24, 2016 Abstract We exploit Medicare national coverage reimbursement approvals as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate how the financing decisions of private and publicly traded firms respond to exogenous changes in investment opportunities. We find that publicly traded companies increase their external financing, and their subsequent product introductions, by more than private companies in response to national coverage approvals. The primary source of the increased financing is through private equity financing of public firms. We show that the stock characteristics of publicly traded firms, such as liquidity and price informativeness, and product market competition are important factors in explaining their financing advantage. Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and NBER. Email for Phillips:
[email protected]. Universidad de los Andes, Chile. Email for Sertsios:
[email protected]. We thank Nicholas Crain, Erik Gilje, Kathleen Kahle, Yelena Larkin, P.T. Léger, Chen Lin, Evgeny Lyandres, Maria Teresa Marchica, Paul Povel, Michael Roberts, Jérôme Taillard, José Tessada, Patricio Valenzuela and seminar participants at Boston University, Erasmus University, John Hopkins University, Universidad Adolfo Ibanez, University of Amsterdam, University of Arizona, University of Southern California, Universidad Católica, the 2014 CICF conference, the 2014 FMA Asian Conference, the 2015 AFA meetings, the 4th mini-TOI conference, the 2nd (2015) Edinburgh Corporate Finance Conference, the 26th (2015) CFEA conference and the 2nd Empirical Workshop in Management Science and Economics for helpful comments. We also thank Juan Cristobal Maass, MD-PhD, for helping us with medical institutional knowledge.