This dissertation has three independent chapters. The first chapter sheds new light on the impact of corporate monitoring by institutional investors. I show that investors with large proportions of their portfolio allocated to a firm, which I term high “portfolio-at-risk” (PAR) institutions, are effective monitors. Textual analysis of more than 200,000 corporate conference calls shows that higher PAR is associated with greater shareholder engagement and smaller institutional investors with high PAR engage as much, if not more, as blockholders with low PAR. Correspondingly, firms owned by high-PAR investors have higher profits and valuations relative to those owned by large, diversified shareholders. Highlighting the importance of high-PAR institutions for corporate monitoring, I document that a reduction in creditor monitoring entails lower profits and valuations but only for firms with low-PAR institutional ownership. These findings suggest a revisit of much extant academic and policy work concerning the drivers and implications of institutional shareholder engagement. The second chapter is joint work with Bradford (Lynch) Levy. Using plausibly exogenous variation in the ability to short-sell, we provide evidence that public information is predominantly impounded into prices via trade. Studying the role of trade in the context of publicly-observed cash flow news, we find that only 6% of total price discovery is realized on announcement days with low trade. A portfolio strategy that focuses on stocks with high announcement-day trade yields monthly alpha of 2.46%. In contrast to the predictions of the literature on no-trade equilibria, our evidence suggests that trade plays a significant role in price discovery. The third chapter is joint work with Ulrich Doraszelski and João Gomes. We develop a baseline model to understand how financial frictions impact industry dynamics. Using state of the art computational tools, we document how key characteristics, such as market size and product differentiation, determine the impact of financing frictions on firms’ price and investment strategies, as well as industry dynamics and welfare. We show that investment and prices tend to move in opposite directions, while long run industry concentration generally rises. Strikingly, financing frictions sometimes lead firms to both invest more and charge lower prices. In turn, this behavior often raises consumer surplus and social welfare, even if industry concentration increases.