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Full-Text Articles in Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics

A Learning Curve Of The Market: Chasing Alpha Of Socially Responsible Firms, Zhichuan Li, Jun Wang, Dylan Minor, Chongyu Dang Dec 2019

A Learning Curve Of The Market: Chasing Alpha Of Socially Responsible Firms, Zhichuan Li, Jun Wang, Dylan Minor, Chongyu Dang

Business Publications

This paper explores stock market reactions to corporate social performance. We find that a value-weighted portfolio based on the list of “100 Best CSR companies in the world”, published by Reputation Institute, yields statistically significant annual abnormal returns of 1.63% and 1.26%, by controlling for Carhart four factors and Fama-French five factors, respectively (2.39% and 1.84% respectively for an equal-weighted portfolio). Moreover, such abnormal returns decrease as time goes, especially after the inaugural publication of the CSR lists in 2013. The paper also indicates that companies with better social performance are more likely to have positive earnings surprises, and that …


Csr-Contingent Executive Compensation Contracts, Zhichuan Li Sep 2019

Csr-Contingent Executive Compensation Contracts, Zhichuan Li

Business Publications

Firms have increasingly started tying their executives’ compensation to CSR-related objectives. In this paper, we attempt to understand why firms offer CSR-contingent compensation and the conditions under which such compensation improves corporate social performance. Using hand-collected data from proxy statements, we find that this emerging compensation practice varies significantly across industries and across different CSR categories. Further, well-governed firms are more likely to offer CSR-contingent compensation, and such compensation does lead to higher corporate social standing. Such firms are more likely to offer formula-based, Objective CSR-contingent compensation. However, our results suggest that non-formulaic, Subjective CSR-contingent compensation also helps improve companies’ …


The Effect Of Corporate Visibility On Corporate Social Responsibility, Zhichuan Li, Taylor Morris, Brian Young Jul 2019

The Effect Of Corporate Visibility On Corporate Social Responsibility, Zhichuan Li, Taylor Morris, Brian Young

Business Publications

Outside of direct ownership, the general public may feel it is an implicit stakeholder of a firm. As the public becomes more vested in a firm’s actions, the firm may be more likely to engage in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. We proxy for the public’s stake in a firm with public visibility. Based on 3,400 unique newspaper publications from 1994 to 2008, we measure visibility for the U.S. S&P 500 firms with the frequency of print articles per year concerning the firm. We find that visibility has a signficant, positive relationship with the CSR rating. Evidence also suggests this …