Corporate customers are an important stakeholder in global supply chains. We employ several unique international databases to test whether socially responsible corporate customers can infuse similar socially responsible business behavior in suppliers. Our findings suggest a unilateral effect on corporate social responsibility (CSR) only from customers to suppliers, an evidence further supported by exogenous variation in customers’ close-call CSR proposals and by product scandals. Customers exert influence on suppliers’ CSR through positive assortative matching and their decision-making process. Enhanced collaborative CSR efforts help improve operational efficiency and firm valuation of both customers and suppliers but increase only the customers’ future sales growth.

Using numeric and textual data extracted from over 50,000 finance articles in Social Science Research Network (SSRN) during 2001–19, we examine the relationship between measured qualities and a paper’s readership, eventual outlet, and impact. Conventionality (semantic similarity with existent research) helps boost readership and publication prospects. However, novelty in the forms of emerging topics and databases are associated with better publishing outcomes. Studies that do not easily map into established finance subfields or that introduce nonfinance elements face a higher hurdle. Finally, papers whose research questions span multiple fields are a hard sell, but those building on prior knowledge from multiple fields are valued.

This paper investigates trading patterns in target and acquirer firms prior to public announcement of M&A deals, a corporate event in which group based co-offence has been anecdotally documented. Our analysis differentiates whether such trading is primarily conducted by hedge funds with short-term investment horizons as opposed to other short horizon investors or hedge funds and institutional investors with long-term horizons, in both the equity and derivatives markets. Our results are consistent with exploitation of M&A deal related information prior to the deal's public announcement. In particular we find that the greater the likelihood of insider information leakage, the greater the short-term hedge fund holdings. We consider several alternative explanations, such as those related to the short-term hedge fund's skill in identifying profitable trades' ex-ante; our results seem inconsistent with such alternative explanations.

This paper exploits the complex information setting of customer-supplier links to assess revealed short-seller attention. Results suggest that short sellers are attentive to the news of corporate customers to short their suppliers’ stocks. This short selling behavior strengthens with co-attention, as proxied by same-day downloads of both customer and supplier SEC disclosure documents by the same investor. Our findings indicate that such short sales predict negative future returns on suppliers’ stocks, suggesting that sophisticated investors trade profitably by focusing their attention on a complicated information setting.

Exploiting the setting of firms that are unable to disclose timely financial reports and thus must file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) the NT 10-K (Q) report, this study examines whether short sellers target firms with financial reporting weaknesses. We find that short interest increases in firms prior to the NT 10-K (Q) filing, suggesting that short sellers identify and target firms that cannot file their financial reports in a timely manner. Short selling is positively significantly related to subsequent late filing status, and is more pronounced in late filers with high newswire activity and with accelerated filing deadlines. Short selling of late filing firms is significantly negatively related to subsequent performance thereby suggesting that short sellers' trades pertinent to late filers are profitable. Overall, the results underscore a high information processing ability of short sellers in the setting of firms that exhibit financial reporting deficiencies.