This dissertation is comprised of three essays that cover topics in financial economics. In Chapter 1, "The Credit Effect of Government Spending", I investigate the role of federal procurement spending in shaping corporate borrowing capacity and investment decisions through the lens of cash flow-based borrowing. Using a structural model, I quantify that firms can borrow 23% more against procurement-based earnings than other market-based earnings, allowing for further borrowing and investment. This channel is particularly important for firms with low assets and high productivity. Losing procurement contracts has long-term consequences. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in public sector spending from the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, I find that reductions in procurement demand lead to a greater decline in investment and a higher cost of accessing external financing for government suppliers, compared to other companies that have similar characteristics ex-ante and have the same revenue trajectory. Overall, the results suggest that, in the presence of cash flow-based financing constraints, the effect of fiscal policy may be transmitted through a novel credit channel. In Chapter 2, "Venture Capital, Firm Creation and Destruction: Evidence from the Pension Protection Act of 2006", I examine the effects of increased access to venture capital (VC) on local entrepreneurship activities and business dynamism. I consider a regulatory change in the U.S. pension system that led to an influx of pension capital into the venture capital sector, and I exploit cross-sectional variation in the exposure to the regulatory change arising from differences in the public pension funding shortfalls across states. I find that expanded access to venture capital significantly increased local business formation following the regulatory change, with the effect being most pronounced in VC-dependent sectors. The increase in business formation is driven by startup entry rather than incumbent firm expansion. In Chapter 3, "Policy Uncertainty and Product Innovation", I empirically study how policy uncertainty affects corporate product innovation. Using granular product-level data on companies in the consumer goods sector, I find that firms reduce the rate of new product introduction and slow down their new product line expansion when faced with increased policy uncertainty. Moreover, I show that firms are more likely to introduce products with fewer novel features to the marketplace during times of heightened policy uncertainty. Additionally, I explore the geographic footprints of products. I find that, at the firm level, policy uncertainty is negatively associated with the geographic availability of products. Overall, this study examines innovation activities from the product dimension, revealing a negative relationship between policy uncertainty and product innovation.