Firms strategically use donations to trade partners’ affiliated charities to achieve better trade outcomes. Exploiting exogenous changes in trading relations and supplier manager turnover, we document a systematic relation between donation patterns and trading dynamics. Affiliated donations increase with relationship importance, relationship-specific investment, and market power. Moreover, they are associated with greater relationship-specific trade credit, technological alignment, and joint investment, supporting an exchange-of-benefits mechanism. These findings also hold for downstream customer-affiliated donations, which increase with product market competition and relationship importance. Our findings highlight charitable giving as a non-market tool through which firms influence trading relationships and outcomes
