Abstract
This study revisits the question of “whether firms are doing well by doing good?”. We examine shareholders-sponsored corporate socially responsible (CSR) proposals related to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) that are voted to pass or fail by a small margin. The adoption of those “close call” proposals is regarded as equivalent to a random assignment of CSR policies and, therefore, provides a quasi-experimental setting to capture the causal influence of CSR on firm performance. We apply the regression discontinuity design (RDD) and find that CSR proposals’ passage leads to a significant positive abnormal return on the voting day. The results are robust with both parametric and nonparametric approaches of RDD and different polynomial orders. However, we fail to identify a significant change in financial performance in the long-term. One possible reason is that passing a CSR proposal could be symbolic, rather than substantial.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 30 |
Pages (from-to) | 1-19 |
Number of pages | 19 |
Journal | Carbon Neutrality |
Volume | 1 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 25 Aug 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2022 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- corporate social responsibility
- financial performance
- regression discontinuity