Dai et al (2019)

Dai, Rui, Hao Liang, and Lilian Ng. “Socially Responsible Corporate Customers.” Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming (2019).

From the authors’ abstract:

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 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.

LK comment: This study won the 2019 Moskowitz Prize.

Link:  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3111073