Publication Type
Working Paper
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
8-2022
Abstract
This paper examines whether economic links with major corporate customers curb corporate carbon emissions. We show that supplier firms with a concentrated customer base have significantly lower carbon emissions. The baseline results are robust to alternative measures of carbon emissions and customer concentration, and various approaches that mitigate endogeneity concerns due to omitted variables and reverse causality. Moreover, the curbing effect of customer concentration on supplier carbon emissions is more pronounced in firms facing lower customer switching costs, with less (more) supplier (customer) bargaining power, fewer redeployable assets, operating in more carbon-intensive industries, and after the Paris Agreement of 2015. Collectively our evidence suggests that major corporate customers can facilitate the transition to a low-carbon economy through decarbonization along the supply chain.
Keywords
Customer-supplier relationships, Customer concentration, Carbon emissions
Discipline
Finance | Finance and Financial Management
Research Areas
Finance
First Page
1
Last Page
57
Identifier
10.2139/ssrn.4180681
Publisher
SSRN
Citation
DENG, Saiying; DUAN, Tinghua; LI, Frank Weikai; and PU, Xiaoling.
Customer concentration and corporate carbon emissions. (2022). 1-57.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/7090
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4180681