We show that social connections between a firm's executives and directors and brokerages that follow the firm decrease the firm's cost of equity. We use quasi-natural experiments to address endogeneity concerns and find that the uncovered effect of firm-brokerage social connections on cost of equity is likely causal. The effect is found to be more pronounced for firms with more soft information, opaque information environments, tight financial constraints, weak corporate monitoring, or high executive equity ownership. Further, consistent with the evidence on cost of equity, we find that firm-brokerage social connections reduce SEO underpricing, decrease information asymmetry in stock markets, and improve the firm's equity valuation.

我们表明，公司高管与跟随公司的董事和经纪人之间的社会联系减少了公司的股本成本。我们使用准自然实验来解决内生性问题，发现企业经纪人社会联系对股权成本的未发现影响很可能是因果关系。对于信息更软，信息环境不透明，财务紧缩，公司监控薄弱或高管股权的公司，这种影响更为明显。此外，与股权成本的证据相一致，我们发现公司与经纪人之间的社会联系减少了SEO定价偏低，减少了股票市场中的信息不对称性并提高了公司的股权估值。