We examine how firms respond to requests for enhanced disclosure that we make on an online investor platform. Exploiting variation in firms' customer and supplier disclosures, we ask a randomized set of non-disclosing firms to provide information on their customers' and suppliers' identities. We find that the firms' probability of disclosure depends on the basis we give for the demand—requests appealing to disclosure's usefulness to investors lead to more frequent disclosure, while those appealing to regulators' preference for disclosure lead to less frequent disclosure. The requests we make on the platform lead to more frequent customer- and supplier-related inquiries from other platform users. We also find that the treatment firms' disclosure of customer and supplier information improves in the next period's regulatory filings. The findings suggest that investor platforms can enhance corporate transparency by increasing retail investors' ability to demand information.

Prior research finds that auditors' social connections with their clients harms audit quality. We examine auditors' social connections with members of their clients' business community, a setting in which auditors' connections may improve audit quality. While social ties within a client's business community should improve auditor competency, they also threaten auditor independence. We test the effects of auditors' network connections on audit quality using data from China, where data on social connections and individual auditors are available. Auditors' business connections should be particularly beneficial in a relational economy like China, where clients heavily rely on social networks for contracting. We find that auditors with strong local business and government connections deliver higher quality audits as evidenced by fewer financial irregularities among their clients. Our findings are consistent with the improved competency that arises from auditors' business connections outweighing the potential costs of impaired auditor independence.

When emerging market firms disclose relationship-based transactions, they face a trade-off in which greater transparency may help lower their cost of capital at the cost of revealing proprietary information. We find that firms overcome this challenge by relying on analysts within their private networks (i.e., connected analysts) who, through repeated interaction with the firm, can better verify relationship-based transactions. Using Chinese firms, we show that firms with more connected analysts have more accurate consensus forecasts and lower forecast dispersion. When a connected analyst departs and stops covering a firm, the accuracy and informativeness of the unconnected analysts' forecasts decrease, suggesting that information spills over from the connected analyst to analysts outside the network. We find a potential mechanism for this information spillover: communication through common institutional clients, which suggests that embedded financial analysts—those sharing close connections with firms and analysts—serve as a channel for disseminating proprietary, hard-to-verify information. JEL Classifications: G14; G15; M40; N25. Data Availability: Data are available from sources identified in the text.

Social ties between mutual funds and the companies in which they invest (investees) can both facilitate information transfers and encourage favoritism. Using the investment choices of mutual funds in China, we compare investment performance of holdings in companies that are socially connected to mutual funds versus those that are not. We find that funds allocate more investment to connected investees' stocks, especially when a fund is weakly monitored. This overweighting is greater in times of poor investee performance, when the benefits of additional investment to the connected investees are high. Weakly monitored funds' preference for connected stocks hurts the returns of these funds, yielding a 6.6 percent lower annualized risk-adjusted return, relative to closely monitored funds. These results suggest that, absent sufficient monitoring, agency conflicts generated by social networks can dominate the information advantages of these networks.