Dong, Chen, and Lin (2016)

Dong, Hui, Tao Chen and Chen Lin.  “Institutional Shareholders and Corporate Social Responsibility: Evidence from Two Quasi-Natural Experiments.”  Working Paper (Shanghai University of Finance and Economics), 2016.

From the authors' abstract:  "[W]e find consistent evidence that institutional shareholders influence firms to engage in better CSR performance using two distinct quasi-natural experiments: 1) exogenous changes in institutional holding caused by Russell Index reconstitutions; [and] 2) exogenous shocks to monitoring intensity conditional on the level of institutional holding. We further find that the effects are more pronounced in consumer oriented industries and firms with financial constraints and poor corporate governance. In addition, we show that institutional shareholders exert their influence on firms’ CSR performance through increased shareholder activism, evidenced by the larger amount and higher likelihood in CSR shareholder proposals."

Link (draft w/ Tao Chen as lead author):  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2924752