This article examines whether firm-level idiosyncratic shocks propagate in production networks. We identify idiosyncratic shocks with the occurrence of natural disasters. We find that affected suppliers impose substantial output losses on their customers, especially when they produce specific inputs. These output losses translate into significant market value losses, and they spill over to other suppliers. Our point estimates are economically large, suggesting that input specificity is an important determinant of the propagation of idiosyncratic shocks in the economy. JEL Codes: L14, E23, E32.

Long payment terms are a strong impediment to the entry and survival of liquidity constrained firms. To test this idea and its implications, I consider the effect of a reform restricting the trade credit supply of French trucking firms. In a difference-in-differences setting, I find that trucking firms' corporate default probability drops by one-fourth following the restriction. The effect is persistent, concentrated among liquidity constrained firms, and not offset by a drop in profits. The restriction also triggers an increase in the entry of small trucking firms.JEL classification: G32, G33, G34, D23 * MIT Sloan School of Management. Email: jnbarrot@mit.edu. I am indebted to Antoinette Schoar and David Thesmar for their invaluable guidance and support. I am grateful to Michael Roberts (the editor) as well as two anonymous referees for their suggestions. I thank Francois Derrien, Laurent Fresard, Denis Gromb, Uli Hege, Augustin Landier, Clemens Otto, and Mitchell Petersen for their very helpful comments in the early stages of this project. I am deeply grateful to Claire Lelarge for her insights and assistance with the data. This work also benefited greatly from conversations with Pol Antras, Adrien Auclert, Arnaud Costinot, Fritz Foley, and from the suggestions of seminar participants at the University of Zurich, Wharton, Berkeley Haas, MIT Sloan, Harvard Business School, Yale SOM, Kellogg, Chicago Booth, UNC Kenan-Flager, Fisher College at Ohio State University, Stanford GSB, ESSEC, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Princeton, and Brigham Young University. All remaining errors are my own. I acknowledge support from the AXA Research Fund and the HEC Paris Foundation.Nonfinancial firms are the main providers of short-term corporate financing to their customers.Accounts payable are three times as large as bank loans and fifteen times as large as commercial paper on the aggregate balance sheet of nonfinancial U.S. businesses. 1 Moreover, interfirm lending finances a disproportionate share of global trade. 2 Yet despite its economic significance, trade credit supply has received little attention relative to firms' other financial and real activities, mainly due to the lack of appropriate empirical setting. 3 In particular, the implications of trade credit provision for firms' corporate liquidity remain poorly understood.While financially stronger firms can extend trade credit to their customers in the form of long payment terms, their financially weaker rivals might expose themselves to liquidity shocks by doing so. Depending on the intensity of competition, they might not be able to pass this excess liquidity risk onto prices. Long payment terms extended by financially stronger firms might thus prevent their constrained rivals from entering, expanding, and surviving in the industry. The main challenge in identifying this mechanism is that firms compete on many dimensions, and that financially stronger firms might have other comparative advantages over their constrained competitors.To solve this identification cha...

This paper examines the extent to which individual investors provide liquidity to the stock market and whether they are compensated for doing so. We show that the ability of aggregate retail order imbalances, contrarian in nature, to predict short-term future returns is significantly enhanced during times of market stress, when market liquidity provisions decline. While a weekly rebalanced portfolio long in stocks purchased and short in stocks sold by retail investors delivers 19% annualized excess returns over a four-factor model from 2002 to 2010, it delivers up to 40% annualized returns in periods of high uncertainty. Despite this high aggregate performance, individual investors do not reap the rewards from liquidity provision because they experience a negative return on the day of their trade and they reverse their trades long after the excess returns from liquidity provision are dissipated. During the financial crisis, French active retail stock traders stepped up to the plate, increased stock holdings, and provided liquidity. In contrast, mutual fund investors fled from delegation by selling their mutual funds.