Abstract
A firm’s social network can provide it with competitive advantage, while its trade credit may reflect the competitiveness of its business operations. Unfortunately, there is a lack of crossover studies looking at both social networks and business credit. This paper investigates the influence of a firm holding different structural hole positions on its trade credit. By defining networks as directors’ interlocking positions and using social network analysis to compute the structural holes, this study demonstrates empirically that firms with more structural holes get more trade credit, thereby enhancing their competitive advantage in the market, and their trade credit-cash sensitivity also decreases. These results hold after controlling for the endogeneity problem and the influence of a network centrality measure. Additional analyses show that the influence of structural hole position on trade credit is more obvious in highly competitive industries and regions that have a higher level of marketisation. Moreover, the effect is found mainly for larger and more mature firms and those situated in a worse information environment, and often manifests during a time of loose monetary policies. The results suggest that the control and information advantages obtained by positioning in structural holes are important in enabling firms to obtain trade credit, which can enhance their competitive advantage. The conclusions contribute to the literature on social network and corporate finance.
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This work is sponsored by the National Natural Science Fund (71202126) and has received grants from the Pilot Reform of Accounting Discipline Clustering and the Joint Construction Project under the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education. I want to thank Professor Shimin Chen (executive editor) and two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions. Also, I want to thank three Professors of Sociology; Jiade Luo at Tsinghua University, Jianwen Wei at the Central University of Finance and Economics, and Jun Liu at Harbin Engineering University, for their valuable comments.
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Chen, Y. 社会网络与商业信用: 基于 “结构洞” 位置的证据. China Account Financ Rev 17, 2 (2015). https://doi.org/10.7603/s40570-015-0002-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.7603/s40570-015-0002-1