IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/applec/v54y2022i13p1460-1472.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Social capital during the coronavirus pandemic: the value of corporate benevolence

Author

Listed:
  • Greg Filbeck
  • Eric Robbins
  • Xin Zhao

Abstract

In this paper, we explore market reaction to announcements of corporate donations associated with the COVID-19 crisis. Companies with larger firm size, higher leverage, higher institutional ownership, and higher ESG rankings are more likely to donate COVID relief. We observe statistically significant positive abnormal returns over the event window, driven by a subsample of community relief funds. Our results support the notion of a strategic, reputational premium for participating firms. Consistent with signalling theory, we find firms without ESG scores show positive share price responses to corporate benevolence announcements. This finding suggests the market is less likely to anticipate corporate acts of benevolence from firms with missing ESG scores. Our findings suggest that the market positively reacts to corporate philanthropy news during a crisis. The strongest stock market reaction is related to those firms with missing or less favourable ESG scores.

Suggested Citation

  • Greg Filbeck & Eric Robbins & Xin Zhao, 2022. "Social capital during the coronavirus pandemic: the value of corporate benevolence," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 54(13), pages 1460-1472, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:54:y:2022:i:13:p:1460-1472
    DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2021.1977773
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2021.1977773
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00036846.2021.1977773?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Riccardo Savio & Edoardo D’Andrassi & Francesca Ventimiglia, 2023. "A Systematic Literature Review on ESG during the COVID-19 Pandemic," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(3), pages 1-17, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:54:y:2022:i:13:p:1460-1472. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RAEC20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.