Corporate social responsibility and executive personality

My dissertation investigates two streams of managerial accounting literature; specifically, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and executive personality. Paper 1 focuses on whether companies strategically engage in CSR practices to retain employees. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find that an increase in the enforcement of non-compete agreements (which enhances a firm’s ability to retain employees) deteriorates CSR performance. Paper 2 extends prior literature and links managerial risk tolerance and firms’ CSR performance. The empirical result of Paper 2 shows that pilot CEOs are less likely to exhibit better CSR performance. Paper 3 examines the spillover effect of managerial risk tolerance along the supply chain. Specifically, I follow Paper 2 to use the pilot status of CEOs to proxy for the customers’ risk tolerance level. Overall, the results support a negative association between customer risk tolerance and supplier investment efficiency, and customer companies ran by pilot CEOs leads to supplier investment inefficiency. Each chapter is designed to be self-contained and provides a more detailed discussion of the research question and contribution.