Journal of Banking and Finance

119 (2020) 105903

Corporate customer concentration and stock price crash risk

Xiaofang Ma，Wenming Wang, Jiangang Wu，Wenlan Zhang

Abstract

Using a large sample of U.S. firms, we find that major corporate customer concentration is positively associated with a firm’s future stock price crash risk. This positive relation is more pronounced when the supplier firms have made a higher level of relationship-specific investments, have a poorer information environment, and/or face lower customer switching costs. Our evidence suggests that exposure to an undiversified corporate customer base can have a negative bearing on a firm’s crash risk.

This study contributes to the literature mainly in two ways.

First, we add to the literature on the economic consequences of corporate customer concentration. Prior studies have demonstrated that firms with a concentrated customer base have a higher cost of equity capital (Dhaliwal et al., 2016), suffer more unfavorable terms in loan contracting (Campello and Gao, 2017), and experience adverse spillover effects from major customers’ negative events (Kolay et al., 2016; Files and Gurun, 2018). Our study extends this line of research by revealing the impact of corporate customer concentration on a firm’s crash risk, which is of great importance to investment decisions and risk management.

Second, a large body of literature has examined the determinants of stock price crashes (e.g., Cao et al., 2002; Hong and Stein, 2003; Jin and Myers, 2006; Hutton et al., 2009; Kim et al., 2011a, 2011b; Callen and Fang, 2013; Kim et al., 2014). This study adds to the emerging literature on the impact of nonfinancial stakeholders on a firm’s crash risk, such as regulators (Kubick and Lockhart, 2016) and employees (Ben-Nasr and Ghouma, 2018; Chen et al., 2019). Our findings shed light on how major corporate customers, another critical nonfinancial stakeholder group, can affect a firm’s future stock price crash risk.