Krüger (2015a)

Krüger, Philipp. “Corporate Goodness and Shareholder Wealth.” Journal of Financial Economics, February, 2015.

From the author’s abstract: “Using a unique data set, I study how the stock market reacts to positive and negative events concerned with a firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR). I provide evidence that investors respond strongly negatively to negative events and weakly negatively to positive events. The reaction is particularly strong when the information concerns employees, the environment, or communities. I then show that investors react positively to positive news about CSR if it concerns firms with poor stakeholder relations. In contrast, investors react negatively to positive events whenever such events are likely to be due to agency problems.”

Link to working paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2287089

Link to published paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304405X14001925