The Spillover Effect of Customer Employee Disclosure on Supplier Inventory Management
Prof. Qian XIN, Associate Professor of Accounting, School of Economics and Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen
Date: 30 May 2025 (Friday)
Time: 14:00 – 15:30
Venue: E22-2002
Host: Prof. Duncan Jiancheng LIU, Assistant Professor in Accounting
Abstract
Recent studies highlight the value relevance of employee disclosure on social media and its role in facilitating the decision-making of capital market participants (Green et al., 2019; Hales et al., 2018; Huang et al., 2020). We investigate whether a firm’s employee disclosure has a spillover effect on supply chain partners’ inventory management. Utilizing a stacked difference-in-differences research design with staggered initiations of employee reviews on a social media platform (i.e., Glassdoor), we find that the supplier’s inventory management efficiency improves with its major customer’s employee disclosure. Regarding the specific types of information embedded in customer employee disclosure, we find a greater effect when customer employee reviews are more predictive of future sales or more relevant to supply chain management. Further analyses provide support that the positive effect of employee disclosure on suppliers’ inventory management efficiency is more prominent when customers’ employee disclosure is more informative, when customers have poorer or more likely biased information environment, and when suppliers have limited private access to customer information or weaker bargaining power. Overall, our findings suggest that employee disclosure provides valuable information to supply chain partners on investment decisions.
Speaker
Prof. Qian XIN is an associate professor of accounting at the School of Economics and Management, Harbin Institute of Technology. Shenzhen. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in accounting from The University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the role of information intermediaries in capital markets, including financial analysts, auditing, and social media. His research papers have been published in Management Science, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Corporate Finance, and Journal of Accounting and Public Policy.
All are welcome!
