Li and Wu (2016)

Li, Jun, and Di (Andrew) Wu.  “Do Corporate Social Responsibility Engagements Lead to Real Environmental, Social, and Governance Impact?”  Working paper (University of Michigan), 2018.

From the authors’ abstract: “In short, it depends on the ownership type. We construct an event-based outcome measure of firm-level environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impact for public and private firms globally from 2007 to 2015 using data from RepRisk. Then, we measure the societal impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagements using participation in the United Nations Global Compact as a proxy. We demonstrate a striking difference between public and private firms: while private firms significantly reduce their negative ESG incident levels after CSR engagements, public firms fail to do so and are more likely to engage in decoupled CSR actions—actions with no subsequent real impact… Our results suggest that existing CSR engagements and one-size-fits-all CSR policy mandates might not necessarily lead to better societal outcomes, and a multi-tiered policy targeting different ownership and industry types might be more efficient at maximizing ex-post ESG benefits.”

Link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2853877