Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a model of corporate governance (CG) extending fiduciary duties from fulfillment of responsibilities towards the firm's owners to fulfillment of analogous fiduciary duties towards all the firm's stakeholders. After considering the place of CSR in the...

In 2010, Maryland became the first state to allow firms to incorporate as “benefit corporations,” which are for-profit entities with a social purpose. Since then, nineteen other states have followed. Using survey data from the population of 94 benefit corporations existent at the time of the...

Our current social, environmental, and economic systems are being confronted with global, interlinked problems such as environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, climate change, and social inequalities and exclusion. Against this background, corporate responsibility (CR) and sustainability...

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...

This article provides a novel methodology to investigate the influence of share ownership on corporate decision making. Quantifying the characteristics of firms' owners based on their measurable investment habits enables us to assess their predominant preferences. We demonstrate that a...

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...

This paper examines the relation between corporate social responsibility (CSR) news releases and local bias. I identify 44 keywords that are used in CSR related research and examine the effects when these words appear in media. Analyses show that CSR news releases reduce firm level local bias,...

Using enforcements of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, we test the hypothesis that socially responsible (ESG) firms receive lower sanctions from prosecutors. Since virtually all cases are settled by bargaining, we estimate sanction specifications derived from a Nash Bargaining model. To...

This study examines whether socially responsible companies are likely to conduct a stock split. We argue that these companies, compared to their counterparts, could use their strong corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance to reduce information asymmetry with shareholders, and...