Market Reaction to News Flows in Supply Chain Networks

This study examines how positive and negative news about firms affects their stock prices and, moreover, how it affects stock prices of the firms' suppliers and clients, using a large sample of publicly listed firms around the world and another of Japanese listed firms. The level of positiveness and negativeness of each news article is determined by FinBERT, a natural language processing model fine-tuned specifically for financial information. Supply chains of firms across the world are identified mostly by financial statements, while those of Japanese firms are taken from large-scale firm-level surveys. We find that positive news increases the change rate of stock prices of firms mentioned in the news before its disclosure, most likely because of diffusion of information through unofficial information channels. Positive news also raises stock prices of the firms' suppliers and clients before and after its disclosure, confirming propagation of market values through supply chains. In addition, we generally find a larger post-news effect on stock prices of the mentioned firms and their suppliers and clients than the pre-news effect. The positive difference between the post- and pre-news effects can be considered as the net effect of the disclosure of positive news, controlling for information diffusion through private channels. However, the post-news effect on suppliers and clients in Japan is smaller than the pre-news effect, which is the opposite result to non-domestic firms from around the world.