摘要
This study revisits the question of“whether firms are doing well by doing good?”.We examine shareholders-sponsored corporate socially responsible(CSR)proposals related to Environmental,Social,and Governance(ESG)that are voted to pass or fail by a small margin.The adoption of those“close call”proposals is regarded as equivalent to a random assignment of CSR policies and,therefore,provides a quasi-experimental setting to capture the causal influence of CSR on firm performance.We apply the regression discontinuity design(RDD)and find that CSR proposals’passage leads to a significant positive abnormal return on the voting day.The results are robust with both parametric and nonparametric approaches of RDD and different polynomial orders.However,we fail to identify a significant change in financial performance in the long-term.One possible reason is that passing a CSR proposal could be symbolic,rather than substantial.
