Abstract
We investigate the structure of global inter-firm relationships using a unique dataset containing information on customers, suppliers, licensors, licensees and strategic alliances for each of 412,814 major incorporated non-financial firms in the world. We focus on three different networks: customer-supplier network, licensee-licensor network, and strategic alliance network. In/out-degree distribution of these networks follows a Pareto distribution with an exponent of 1.5. The shortest path length on the networks for any pair of firms is around six links. The networks have a scale-free property. We also find that stock price returns tend to be more highly correlated the closer two listed firms are to each other in the networks. This suggests that a non-negligible portion of price fluctuations stems from the propagation of a particular firm’s shocks through inter-firm relationships.
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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Mizuno, T., Ohnishi, T., Watanabe, T. (2015). The Structure of Global Inter-firm Networks. In: Aiello, L., McFarland, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8852. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7_42
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7_42
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