Bae, El Ghoul, Guedhami, Kwok, and Zheng (2017)

Bae, Kee-Hong, Sadok El Ghoul, Omrane Guedhami, Chuck C.Y. Kwok, Ying Zheng.  “Does Corporate Social Responsibility Reduce the Costs of High Leverage? Evidence from Capital Structure and Product Markets Interactions.”  Working paper (Schulich School of Business, York University), 2017.

From the authors' abstract:  "We find that CSR reduces losses in market share when firms are highly leveraged. By reducing adverse behavior by customers and competitors, CSR helps highly leveraged firms keep customers and guard against rival predation. Our results support the stakeholder value maximization view of CSR."

Link:  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2959444