A review of short-term event studies in operations and supply chain management

The short-term event study method, grounded in the Efficient Market Hypothesis, is one of the most widely used tools for quantifying the impact of a specific event on a firm's shareholder value. As the short-term event study method has been increasingly employed by researchers to investigate various operations and supply chain management (OSCM) events, it is timely to conduct a systematic review of the method to examine how it has been implemented in the OSCM literature and what could be improved to deploy it for future OSCM research. Analyzing 29 short-term event studies published in renowned OSCM journals between 1995 and 2017, we find that OSCM researchers generally follow the standard procedures in conducting event studies, but pay less attention to some methodological issues ranging from addressing the confounding events to expanding the event windows. Based on our analysis, we provide several recommendations for future event studies in OSCM, such as the opportunity for studying external events in the non-U.S. context, the caution of expanding the event windows, and the need to deal with the self-selection bias.