Motivated by agency theory, we explore the effect of corporate governance quality on corporate social responsibility (CSR), using the governance standards provided by the Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). Our evidence reveals that firms with more effective governance make significantly...

In 2002, U.S. stock exchanges and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act established minimum standards for director independence. An unintended consequence of these director rules was to alter firm choice of other tools for mitigating agency problems. This unintended consequence is studied on a new dataset with...

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...

The lack of diversity across gender and race of corporate boards has been one of the most significant issues in corporate board governance in recent years. Given the critical role that shareholders have in approving director appointments, we analyze voting patterns in director elections to...

How does a board of directors decide what is right? The contest over this question is frequently framed as a debate between shareholder value and stakeholder rights, between a utilitarian view of the ethics of corporate governance and a deontological one. This paper uses a case study with...

Although a growing number of investors are engaging with sovereign entities on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, little academic research investigates this new form of investor activism. Applying universal ownership theory and drawing on eleven case studies of policy...

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...

Purpose: This study aimed to determine the relationship between the environmental, social, and governance factors (ESG) and the financial performance of mining firms within South Africa. Prior research has focussed primarily on the ESG components and lacked further investigation on the...

This study examines the role of foreign institutional ownership in corporate social responsibility. Using the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect as a quasi-natural experiment, our difference-in-differences estimation shows that foreign institutional ownership drives firms’ CSR improvements....