Do Female Executives Prioritize Corporate Social Responsibility?

ABSTRACT

How do female executives view corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Previous studies have reported mixed findings on the relationship between female executives and CSR. We select a sample of Chinese listed firms and use propensity score matching to construct a new sample of firms and evaluate the gender transition (from male to female) of chief executive officers or board chairpersons (executives) who are randomly assigned to firms (i.e., the gender transition of executives is regarded as an exogenous event). Subsequently, we use a difference-in-differences approach to identify the pure effect of female executives on CSR. Our results indicate that female executives are more likely to encourage CSR reporting. Moreover, we suggest that the mechanism behind female executives prioritizing CSR is altruism preference rather than risk aversion preference.

KEY WORDS:

• altruism preference
• corporate social responsibility
• female executive
• propensity score matching

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• G34
• M14
• M51

Acknowledgment

We would like to express our gratitude to Juan Xu for providing support in data collection, which have considerably aided our research.

Notes

^1. We use one-to-one, one-to-two, and one-to-three for the nearest-neighbor matching method. In addition, we use the Mahalanobis distance method to match the treatment and control groups.

^2. The null hypothesis is $H_0:\left({\bar{X}}_{\mathrm{F}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{m}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{l}\mathrm{e}}-{\bar{X}}_{\mathrm{n}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{n}-\mathrm{F}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{m}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{l}\mathrm{e}}\right)=0$. For ${\bar{X}}_{\mathrm{F}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{m}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{l}\mathrm{e}}$ and ${\bar{X}}_{\mathrm{n}\mathrm{o}\mathrm{n}-\mathrm{F}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{m}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{l}\mathrm{e}}$, $\bar{X}$ is the mean of the characteristic variables of the Female and Non-female firms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71790593 and 71521061] and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [No: 2018M631984].