Empirical Examination of the Direct and Moderating Role of Corporate Social Responsibility in Top Executive Compensation

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the direct association between firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) scores, CSR disclosures and executive compensation. This study further investigates the moderating role of CSR in the association between executive compensation and firms’ stock market and accounting performances.Design/methodology/approach: This study collects CEO compensation information from the Execucomp database and CSR performance information from the MSCI ESG database. The final sample consists of 4,193 firm-year observations for 1,318 US public firms for the period 2009–2013. This study uses lagged regression analysis to test the direct and moderating roles of CSR in executive compensation.Findings: Regarding the direct role of CSR, this study finds that CEO compensation is positively related to CSR performance but not to firms’ issuance of CSR reports. This study …