Married CEOs and corporate social responsibility

By S. Hegde, Dev R. Mishra. Journal of Corporate Finance, 2019

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Studies in social sciences suggest that a normative commitment to stable, biological married life is a potent catalyst for inculcating and nourishing prosocial values, preferences and behaviors among family members. Extrapolating from this literature, we investigate whether firms led by married chief executive officers (CEOs) are associated with better corporate social responsibility (CSR). Our analysis of 2163 U.S. public corporations from 1993 to 2008 shows that firms led by married CEOs are associated with significantly higher scores on a popular CSR index, after controlling for a wide range of firm characteristics and CEO attributes. Further, the observed positive relation is particularly sharper with the diversity and employee relations components of CSR. Our findings highlight CEO marital status as an important driver of socially responsible corporate decision making.

Subfields: Accounting, Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a1ef15875ca4af3ec4424236d8be26d3537b11f8

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In Accounting

1. Andrew Koch
2. Stuart L. Gillan
3. Laura T. Starks
4. Pedro Matos
5. Miguel A. Ferreira
6. F. Ferri
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In Marketing

1. Stuart L. Gillan
2. Laura T. Starks
3. Andrew Koch

In Strategy and Management

1. Andrew Koch
2. Stuart L. Gillan
3. Laura T. Starks
4. F. Ferri
5. Jeffrey L. Callen
6. Peter Iliev
7. Audra L. Boone
8. Yawen Jiao

Citations in the corpus

• Firms and social responsibility: A review of ESG and CSR research in corporate finance (2021, background): “Still another study has maintained that whether a CEO is married affects the likelihood that the firm will have better CSR practices (Hegde and Mishra, 2019).”
• Do foreign institutional investors drive corporate social responsibility? Evidence from listed firms in China (2020, unknown): “To mitigate potential concerns that our results may arise from omitting time-invariant firm-specific factors, we follow Hegde and Mishra (2019) to estimate equation (1) by employing a firm fixed-effect approach.”