Hong, Li, and Minor (2015)

Hong, Bryan, Frank Li, and Dylan Minor. “Corporate Governance and Executive Compensation for Corporate Social Responsibility.”  Working paper (Harvard Business School), 2015.

From the authors' abstract:  "We test our predictions [from an agency cost model] using novel executive compensation contract data, and find that firms with more shareholder-friendly corporate governance are more likely to provide compensation to executives linked to firm social performance outcomes. Also, providing executives with incentives for CSR is associated with a higher level of engagement in CSR activities at the firm level. The findings provide evidence identifying corporate governance as a determinant of managerial incentives for social performance, and suggest that CSR activities are more likely to be beneficial to shareholders, as opposed to an agency cost."

See Ferrel, Liang, and Renneboog (2014).

Link:  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2553963