CEO poverty experience and corporate environmental violations
研究CEO早期贫困经历如何通过影响其管理注意力，促使企业更可能发生环境违规行为，并发现教育背景和业绩差距的调节作用。
Abstract This study explores the effect of chief executive officer (CEO) early‐life poverty experiences on firms' environmental violations. By integrating upper echelon theory and imprinting theory, we argue that CEOs' poverty imprints cause them to re‐evaluate their life priorities and channel managerial attention to their firms' economic goal domains, thereby encouraging CEOs to pursue firm economic performance rather than environmental responsibility. Consequently, they manifest a tendency to engage in environmental violations. An analysis of a large sample of publicly listed Chinese firms during the period 2008–2020 provides strong support for the positive effect of CEO poverty experience on corporate environmental violations. This poverty imprint effect is weaker for CEOs with higher education backgrounds but stronger for firms with greater horizontal performance gaps. Our results survived an endogeneity check and various robustness tests.