CSR committees, politicians and CSR efforts

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to study the relationships among the presence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) committee, politicians on CSR committee and CSR disclosure in 10-Ks using data from S&P 500 firms during 2005–2013.Design/methodology/approachThe authors manually check the information of CSR committees as well as committees with CSR/sustainability functions from proxy statements (DEF 14a). CSR disclosure from 10-Ks is obtained by using a Python library named Beautiful Soup 4 to clean the rough data from the raw format files from EDGAR.FindingsThe authors find that superior sustainability governance is associated with more voluntary CSR disclosure in their 10-K reports. More importantly, they find that CSR committee members with working experiences as politicians play an important role to improve CSR disclosure. In the robustness tests, they find that CSR committee and the politicians on CSR committee are also associated with high KLD CSR score ratings.Practical implicationsThe finding in our paper that politicians on CSR committee can enhance CSR efforts may provide practical implications to some companies. Companies may consider inviting people who have political connections and experience to serve on CSR committees.Originality/valueThe authors find the presence of politicians on CSR committee is associated with CSR disclosure and CSR performance. That's new to the CSR governance literature and makes contributions to CSR disclosures and CSR committee expertise and skills.