Customer concentration, managerial risk aversion, and hostile takeover threats

Exploiting a unique measure of takeover vulnerability principally based on the staggered passage of anti-takeover state legislations, we investigate how customer concentration is influenced by the discipline of the market for corporate control, which is widely regarded as a crucial instrument of external corporate governance. Our results demonstrate that more takeover exposure raises customer concentration considerably. Specifically, a rise in takeover susceptibility by one standard deviation increases customer concentration by 8.10%− 9.16%. When insulated from the discipline of the takeover market, risk-averse managers prefer to live a quiet life, trying to reduce firm risk. Consequently, they seek to lower customer concentration as a high level of customer concentration is risky. Therefore, firms more exposed to hostile takeovers exhibit higher customer concentration. Further analysis including entropy balancing, propensity score matching, and instrumental-variable analysis validates the results. Our study is the first to link customer concentration to the market for corporate control.