Customer Concentration and Stock Liquidity(2/2)

This research examines how a firm with concentrated customer base affects its stock liquidity. We propose two competing hypotheses to test this association. We also discover the channels for this association from the angles of customers’ bargaining power, suppliers’ corporate governance quality, and the length of customer-supplier relationships. To further deal with the endogeneity concerns, we use M&A waves in customers’ industries (downstream industry mergers) to instrument for customer concentration. We also follow Cen et al. (2017) and use relationship establishment as event study to conduct DID analysis to examine the impact of customer–supplier relationships on supplier’s stock liquidity. Lastly, we also propose a few robustness tests to verify our empirical results.