CSR Research: Responsible Corporate Leadership

RESEARCH BRIEF - Firms with a track record of addressing slavery risk, especially for firms that face high exposure to slave labor by virtue of their operating environments were rewarded by investors with positive abnormal returns.

RESEARCH BRIEF - Women achieve greater gains in pay than men when moving from one company to another. However, the pay gap persists, driven by inequity in performance-based bonuses.

Strong CSR practices can create a virtuous cycle—regardless of past behavior, once firms have adopted CSR behaviors, there is a decreased likelihood of subsequent irresponsible behavior.

RESEARCH BRIEF - The number of women on boards has a positive impact on disclosure of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices, but only when there is at least three or more women directors on the board.

Well-aligned corporate citizenship practices can smooth cultural integration after mergers and acquisitions.

RESEARCH BRIEF - While women directors are more likely than men to hold positions on multiple boards, there is still work to be done to assure that women directors are positioned to influence firm governance.

RESEARCH BRIEF - LGBTQ+ workplace equality policies enhance a firm’s ability to detect nuanced insights about customers, which results in higher customer satisfaction. However, this can vary depending on the stability of demand among customers.

RESEARCH BRIEF - Voluntary approaches to promote gender diversity on boards (i.e., corporate governance codes), increase women directors’ access to information within a network of other directors. Binding legislation (i.e., gender quotas), increase the likelihood that individual women will act as unique bridges between peers, which heightens their control over information and power within those networks.

RESEARCH BRIEF - While companies with women CEOs have lower representation of women in top management teams, this effect is lessened when women CEOs hold more power, boards are open to change, and industry growth is stronger.

RESEARCH BRIEF - Firms with higher board geographical diversity have higher corporate citizenship performance.

RESEARCH BRIEF - Gender diversity on boards yields innovation results when the number of women is representative rather than symbolic.

RESEARCH BRIEF - Using data on CEO departures, financial data, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores, researchers analyzed the relationship between CSR performance and CEO turnover, in addition to a CEOs’ job market prospects.