From native-place ties to stock price informativeness: nonlocal chamber affiliation and capital market information efficiency

This study examines how firms’ affiliation with nonlocal chambers of commerce affects capital market information efficiency. Using Chinese A-share listed firms from 2007 to 2024, we find that nonlocal chamber affiliation is associated with a modest but statistically significant reduction in stock‑price synchronicity, indicating that more firm-specific information is incorporated into stock prices. This finding remains robust across alternative measures, samples, matching procedures, high-dimensional fixed effects, staggered-treatment estimators, and additional identification tests. Evidence from price delay and future earnings response coefficients further confirms that the decline in synchronicity reflects improved information incorporation rather than greater idiosyncratic noise. We further show that nonlocal chamber affiliation enhances MD&A disclosure specificity, improves disclosure quality, and increases media coverage, highlighting the role of chamber networks in strengthening firms’ external information environments. The effect is stronger among firms with weaker political connections, lower product-market competition, and stronger merchant‑guild culture, and varies with financing constraints and asset mispricing. These findings reveal how native-place business networks shape corporate information environments and stock price informativeness, extending research on informal institutions, organizational embeddedness, and capital market information efficiency in emerging markets.