Research summary: Drawing on the “varieties of capitalism” literature, we develop an actor-centered framework that explains firm-level corporate social performance (CSP) by emphasizing the importance of considering owners' and other stakeholders' motives towards CSP — which can be...

We explore how powerful CEOs view investments in corporate social responsibility (CSR). The agency view suggests that CEOs invest in CSR to enhance their own private benefits. On the contrary, the conflict resolution view argues that CSR investments are made to resolve the conflicts among...

Corporate managers often invest in activities that are deemed to be socially responsible. In some instances, these investments enhance shareholder value. However, in other cases, altruistic managers or managers who privately benefit from the positive attention arising from these activities may...

CEO activism — the practice of CEOs taking public positions on environmental, social, and political issues not directly related to their business — has become a hotly debated topic in corporate governance. To better understand the implications of CEO activism, we examine its prevalence, the...

This paper examines how companies respond to negative ESG incidents by appointing directors with experience in charitable organizations. We find that firms are more likely to make such appointments following ESG incidents, especially when these incidents attract substantial media attention or...

This research article examines the relationship between women’s empowerment and corporate ESG disclosure variables by analyzing 10,121 publicly traded companies listed worldwide with historical ESG data available in Bloomberg from 2016 to 2020. The paper seeks to answer whether corporate...

Corporate customers are an important stakeholder in global supply chains. We employ several unique international databases to test whether socially responsible corporate customers can infuse similar socially responsible business behavior in suppliers. Our findings suggest a unilateral effect on...

We analyze a unique source of media data to assess the influence of different topics of corporate news on costs of financing for a sample of large European and US firms from 2006 to 2016. We distinguish between volume (number of news), tonality (positive, neutral, negative), source (financial...

We analyze whether fraud firms modify their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities in anticipation of the revelation of a corporate misconduct. Specifically, our results show that firms that participated in illegal price fixing schemes strategically increase their CSR initiatives...

Mutual funds must publish policies announcing how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting...