This paper is the first in a series considering a rather tired argument in corporate governance circles, that corporate laws that give only rights to stockholders somehow implicitly empower directors to regard other constituencies as equal ends in governance. By continuing to suggest that...

This study evaluates the effect of board composition on firm corporate social responsibility (CSR) score. We report new evidence which shows a significant and negative association between co-opted directors and the CSR score. This finding is robust to various approaches that account for...

This paper examines the role of CEO’s innate altruism in explaining firm corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance by studying a sample of U.S. firms that are S&P 1500 components over the period 1997-2018. Building on the literature that highlights the importance of cultural heritage...

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...

We present evidence on the way personal and institutional factors could together guide public company directors in decision-making concerning shareholders and stakeholders. In a sample comprising more than nine hundred directors originating from over fifty countries and serving in firms from...

The purpose of this paper is to study the relevance of ownership and CEOs' characteristics in the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Specifically, it is proposed that ownership structure characterised by the presence of large shareholders is related to CSR...

Motivated by the on-going debate on the costs and benefits of CSR, we explore how talented managers view CSR investments. Based on nearly 20,000 observations across 17 years, our evidence reveals a non-monotonic effect of managerial talent on CSR. Exploiting a novel measure of managerial ability...

Using the staggered enactment of state-level constituency statutes as an exogenous shock to corporate social responsibility, we find that directors' information acquisition intensity, measured by the return for their trading of company shares, decreases by 4% after the enactment. Our results are...

We examine the relation between chief executive officer (CEO) locality (i.e., CEOs working near their hometowns) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. The CSR score of firms with local CEOs exceeds that of firms without local CEOs by an amount equivalent to 11.1% of the sample...

This study examines the effect of senior executives’ academic career experience on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and further investigates how such CSR engagement dominated by academic senior executives affects firm value. Using data from China, this study reveals that firms run by...