Finance and society: On the foundations of corporate social responsibility

This thesis consists of six chapters. The first four chapters explore different foundations of CSR. Chapter 1 studies the legal and institutional foundations of CSR around the world. Chapter 2 studies the agency foundations of CSR, with a focus on whether CSR should be regarded as an agency problem or value-enhancing tool. Chapter 3 studies the ownership foundations of CSR by investigating the role of family ownership and state ownership in driving corporate shareholder-stakeholder relationship. Chapter 4 investigates the cultural and cognitive foundations of CSR by focusing on how languages people speak around the world may explain cross-country and cross-firm variations in CSR practice. The fifth and sixth chapters look at the social influence of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the social context of corporate governance using Chinese data. Chapter 5 investigates how state presence in corporations through shareholdings and political connections affects managerial compensation, and how such state influence is attenuated following the removal of market friction. Chapter 6 extends the analysis of state influence to the context of international investment, and investigates how two major state control mechanisms – state ownership and managerial political connections – can influence globalization decisions and the degree of globalization of SOEs during different time and in different stages of international investment.