Corporate social responsibility and trade credit

Abstract

Prior studies show that higher corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance lowers firms’ cost of debt and equity financing. Using a sample of 16,463 U.S. firm-year observations that represent more than 2455 individual firms over the 1996–2016 period, we investigate the relation between all aspects of CSR and trade credit. We provide strong and robust evidence that higher overall CSR scores are related to a higher level of trade credit. A further examination reveals positive associations between trade credit and the four CSR individual components (i.e., the environment, employee relations, community, and diversity). Taken together, our results highlight the important signaling role that CSR plays in increasing the suppliers’ willingness to extend trade credit. Our study also has an important supply chain implication that emphasizes the role of CSR in designing contracts between buyers and suppliers and the level of trade credit for buyer firms with CSR investments.