Financing and New Product Decisions of Private and Publicly Traded Firms

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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 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. Private equity financing is the primary source of the increased financing for 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.