Suppliers as financial intermediaries: Trade credit for undervalued firms

We examine the impact of undervaluation on a firm's use of trade credit. To address potential endogene- ity bias, we construct our instrumental variable based on mutual fund outflow-driven price pressure, and our undervaluation measure allows us to distinguish misvaluation from fair valuation. We find that a firm's suppliers play an important role in providing temporary bridge financing when the firm is under- valued. The effect varies with the firm's information environment and with its dependence on external finance. In addition, based on a manually matched supplier-customer sample, we show that small cus- tomers in long-term relationships with their suppliers are more likely to obtain trade credit when fac- ing stock market undervaluation, while small suppliers with a smaller customer pool extend more trade credit to their undervalued customers.