高管任期与企业社会责任--基于“职业生涯忧虑”的研究视角

Executive Tenure and Corporate Social Responsibility:From the Perspective of Career Concerns

高管是企业社会责任行为的决策者,但现有研究局限于高管背景特征,忽略了高管任期不同阶段对企业社会责任的动态影响。本文以2010-2018年我国A股上市公司为样本,实证检验高管在任期不同阶段对企业社会责任的影响。研究发现:(1)高管在任职初期对企业社会责任有显著的负向影响。(2)高管正常离任时,离任前一年对企业社会责任的影响显著为负;高管非正常离任时,离任前一年对企业社会责任并无显著的负向影响。(3)股权集中度对高管任期的影响有显著的调节作用,第一大股东持股比例较低的公司,高管任职初期和离任前一年对社会责任的不利影响更为显著。本文的研究结论揭示了高管任期不同阶段对社会责任的影响差异,丰富了企业社会责任影响因素的相关研究。

Corporate social responsibility(CSR)has received widespread public attention.In recent years,CSR has also become a hot topic in academic research.The commitment of CSR depends on executives,but existing research focuses only on the executive background and ignores the dynamic impact of executive tenure on CSR.Executives are decision makers and executors of CSR,and are one of the important internal factors that affect corporate social responsibility performance.Fama(1980)First raised the issue of managerial career concerns.Because of“career concerns,”managers work hard in the early stage of their tenure and slack when they are close to leaving.For example,CEO will hide bad news at the beginning of his tenure in order to obtain Long-term benefits.CEO will also hide bad news in the year before he leaves to improve reputation,obtain higher compensation benefits and better career development.In the Long run,R&D investment can bring economic benefits and reputation.However,these benefits cannot be enjoyed when executives are close to leaving.Therefore,CEO will have a strong incentive to reduce R&D and advertising expenditure at the end of his tenure,so as to improve company profitability and bonus(Liu and Liu,2007).It can be seen that,driven by career development and economic benefits,executives will take different strategic decisions at different stages of their tenure.This paper holds that executives have a strong“career anxiety”in early and late stage of their tenure,and tend to improve company performance.At this time,as CSR is not compulsory,executives choose to ignore corporate social responsibility performance.This paper divides executive departures into normal departures and abnormal departures.If executives leave normally,they will anticipate their departure time in advance and be able to make decisions that are conducive to their career development in the year before leaving.If executives leave abnormally,they cannot predict the departure time and cannot make arrangements in advance.This paper uses China's A-share listed companies as samples from 2010 to 2018 and empirically studies the impact of executives'tenure on CSR.The research results show that:(1)Executives have a significant negative impact on CSR in early years of their tenure.At the same time,executives have a negative impact on CSR in the year before their departure,but the results are not robust.(2)After distinguishing the reasons for departure of executives,we found that there is a significant negative impact on CSR in the year before executives'departure if executives leave normally.But the negative impact on CSR is not significant if executives leave abnormally.(3)In companies with lower concentration of equity,the negative impact on CSR in early years of executives'tenure and the year before executives'departure is more serious.We use the propensity score matching(PSM)method to solve the endogeneity problem,he conclusion still holds after using PSM.The conclusions of this paper reveal the differences in the impact of different stages of executives on social responsibility,enrich the research on CSR.This paper has important practical significance for enterprises to restrain their self-interested behaviors,better fulfill their social responsibilities and supervise enterprises'non-financial information disclosure.The possible contributions of this paper are:Firstly,this paper finds new factors that influence CSR,and theoretically enriches literature on CSR.Existing literature mainly focuses on the heterogeneity and length of executives'tenure,ignoring the dynamic impact of executives on CSR at different stages of their tenure.Secondly,this paper distinguishes the reasons for the departure of executives,and finds that only in the case of normal departures(retirement,term expiry and health issues),will executives have a negative impact on the performance of social responsibility in the last year of his tenure.This result has important implications for the follow-up study of executives'tenure.Lastly,the conclusions of this paper are of practical significance for companies to consider the role of large shareholders in corporate governance and strengthen the supervision of self-interest behavior of executives.