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...

In a 2010 special report, The Economist magazine termed the resurgence of state-owned, publicly listed enterprises “Leviathan Inc.” and criticized the poor governance and low efficiency of these firms. We compile a new comprehensive dataset of state ownership of publicly listed firms in 44...

We investigate how firms react to their product-market peers' commitment to and adoption of corporate social responsibility (CSR) using a regression discontinuity design approach. Relying on the passage or failure of CSR proposals by a narrow margin of votes during shareholder meetings, we find...

In the corporate finance tradition starting with Berle & Means (1923), corporations should generally be run so as to maximize shareholder value. The agency view of corporate social responsibility (CSR) generally considers CSR as a managerial agency problem and a waste of corporate resources,...

We argue that the language spoken by corporate decision makers influences their firms' social responsibility and sustainability practices. Linguists suggest that obligatory future-time reference (FTR) in a language reduces the psychological importance of the future. Prior research has shown that...

We investigate the fundamental determinants and value implications of corporate social responsibility (CSR) around the world. We contrast three broad views on CSR: (1) it is a response to government failures; (2) it reflects individual and societal preferences; (3) it is an equilibrium result of...

This paper exploits newly available information on firms' direct (own production) and indirect (supplier-generated) carbon emission intensities and transaction-level imports to conduct an in-depth analysis of whether and how U.S. firms address climate change. We find robust evidence that U.S....

We study how societal culture shapes business activities and corporate behavior by leveraging data on the locations of Confucian schools in Ancient China. The number of historic Confucian schools surrounding a current firm’s location proxies for the firm’s exposure to Confucianism, the...

This study examines the impact of merger and acquisition (M&A) announcements made by U.S. companies listed on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Chinese companies listed on Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges on acquiring frms' stock returns. The event study methodology is employed to...