Interfirm Relationships and Business Performance

Jing Cai and Adam Szeidl

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2018, vol. 133, issue 3, 1229-1282

Abstract: We organized business associations for the owner-managers of young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance. We randomized 2,820 firms into small groups whose managers held monthly meetings for one year, and into a “no-meetings” control group. We find the following. (i) The meetings increased firm revenue by 8.1%, and also significantly increased profit, factors, inputs, the number of partners, borrowing, and a management score. (ii) These effects persisted one year after the conclusion of the meetings. (iii) Firms randomized to have better peers exhibited higher growth. We exploit additional interventions to document concrete channels. (iv) Managers shared exogenous business-relevant information, particularly when they were not competitors, showing that the meetings facilitated learning from peers. (v) Managers created more business partnerships in the regular than in other one-time meetings, showing that the meetings improved supplier-client matching.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (77)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjx049 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Interfirm Relationships and Business Performance_ (2017)
Working Paper: Interfirm Relationships and Business Performance (2016)
Working Paper: Interfirm Relationships and Business Performance (2016)
Working Paper: Interfirm Relationships and Business Performance (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:133:y:2018:i:3:p:1229-1282.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().