Does Corporate Social Responsibility Lead to Superior Financial Performance? A Regression Discontinuity Approach
利用股东提案投票的微小差异作为准实验，发现通过企业社会责任提案的公司有更好的公告回报和会计业绩，主要来自劳动生产率和销售增长。
This study examines the effect of shareholder proposals related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) on financial performance. Specifically, I focus on CSR proposals that pass or fail by a small margin of votes. The passage of such “close call” proposals is akin to a random assignment of CSR to companies and hence provides a quasi-experiment to study the effect of CSR on performance. I find that the adoption of close call CSR proposals leads to positive announcement returns and superior accounting performance, implying that these proposals are value enhancing. When I examine the channels through which companies benefit from CSR, I find that labor productivity and sales growth increase after the vote. Finally, I document that close call CSR proposals differ from non-close proposals along several dimensions. Accordingly, although my results imply that adopting close call CSR proposals is beneficial to companies, they do not necessarily imply that CSR proposals are beneficial in general. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2038 . This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance.