Spillover effects in empirical corporate finance

Abstract

Despite their importance, the discussion of spillover effects in empirical research often misses the rigor dedicated to endogeneity concerns. We analyze a broad set of workhorse models of firm interactions and show that spillovers naturally arise in many corporate finance settings. This has important implications for the estimation of treatment effects: (i) even with random treatment, spillovers lead to a complicated bias; (ii) fixed effects can exacerbate the spillover-induced bias. We propose simple diagnostic tools for empirical researchers and illustrate our guidance in an application.