Abstract

Amid the wave of escalating global economic uncertainty, intensifying geopolitical tensions, and rising supply chain vulnerabilities, whether and how financial analysts as key capital market participants and information intermediary influence corporate supply chain resilience remains an important yet unsolved question. Using a large sample of Chinese firms, we find that firms with greater analyst coverage is associated with stronger supply chain resilience. To address endogeneity problems, we first use expected analyst coverage as an instrumental variable and obtain qualitatively similar results. We then exploit a quasi-natural experiment in which brokerage closures and mergers exogenously reduce analyst coverage, and we show that supply chain resilience weakens after these events. Analyses of the economic mechanisms indicate that the baseline effect is stronger for firms with higher information asymmetry or more severe financing constraints. Heterogeneity tests further reveal larger effects among state owned enterprises, among firms with lower supply chain efficiency, and among firms that operate across greater geographic distances. Overall, our study provides novel evidence and offers a deeper understanding of how sell-side analysts enhance the efficiency of supply chain network.