We investigate real effects of a widespread corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting mandate. In 2014, the European Union (EU) passed Directive 2014/95 (hereafter, “CSR Directive”), mandating large listed EU firms to prepare annual nonfinancial reports beginning from fiscal year 2017...

Lawyers, law schools, and corporate entities have shown an increased interest in sustainable business strategies. This is reflected by the increase in sustainability practice groups, law school courses, and textbooks focusing on the relationship between sustainability and business law; lawyers...

Externalities occur where an economic actor takes a decision which results in actions that affect other parties without their consent. In most cases, the creator of the externality will be a corporation because they are the most important actors in modern economies. There is a market failure as...

We document that firms increase their investment in ESG activities, a proxy for CSR performance, in anticipation of lawsuits from external stakeholders to mitigate the adverse consequences of such legal externalities. We find that higher CSR performance is also positively related to the...

This Article responds to recent proposals calling for the SEC to adopt a mandatory ESG-disclosure framework. It illustrates how the breadth and vagueness of these proposals obscures the important—and controversial—policy questions that would need to be addressed before the SEC could move...

Certain types of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities can generate an ‘insurance-like’ benefit for firms (Godfrey, 2005). Thus far, this risk management hypothesis has been verified for the effects of firm-specific negative events. We argue that this insurance-like benefit of...

This paper assesses whether shareholders drive the environmental and social (E&S) performance of firms worldwide. Across 41 countries, we find that institutional ownership is positively associated with E&S performance with additional tests suggesting this relation is causal. Our evidence shows...

Management scholars have sought to answer the question: is there a financial payoff for ad-dressing ecological and social issues? We move beyond this question and include a time com-ponent for corporate financial performance (CFP) and a firm’s innovativeness in order to ask: when does it pay?...

The paper applies a two-state switching regression to examine the behavior of a hypothetical portfolio of ten socially responsible equity mutual funds during the expansion and contraction phases of US business cycles between April 1991 and June 2009, based on the Carhart four-factor model, using...

The financial crisis has brought about dramatic consequences for economies and societies. Questions emerge about responsibility for the crisis and, implicitly or explicitly irresponsibility; the obligations to take responsibility for the costs and other adverse effects of the recession; and the...