Krüger (2010)

Krüger, Philipp. “Corporate Social Responsibility and the Board of Directors.” Working paper (Toulouse School of Economics), June 30, 2010.

From the authors’ abstract: “What is the relationship between social responsibility and corporate governance? To shed light on this issue, I examine whether and how positive and negative social responsibility events relate to characteristics of a firm’s board of directors. In doing so, I rely on a panel data set of 2417 publicly listed US firms between 1999 and 2007 for which I observe the occurrence of social responsibility events and director characteristics. When boards include a higher fraction of inside and experienced directors, negative events are less frequent. In line with experimental evidence that women are more concerned with altruism, I also document that firms with a higher fraction of women on the board show more pro-social behavior.”