IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32869.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Politicization of Social Responsibility

Author

Listed:
  • Todd A. Gormley
  • Manish Jha
  • Meng Wang

Abstract

Institutional investors are less likely to support shareholder proposals related to environmental and social issues for firms headquartered in Republican-led states. The lower support concentrates in recent years, coinciding with politicians highlighting firms’ social responsibility efforts, and among companies that receive state-level subsidies and tax breaks. Investor backing also varies with changes in state leadership. Support for these proposals drops by 13 percentage points in the same state when Republicans are in charge instead of Democrats. The findings suggest that politicians can influence businesses by swaying the votes of institutional investors, who prioritize maximizing shareholder value in their portfolios.

Suggested Citation

  • Todd A. Gormley & Manish Jha & Meng Wang, 2024. "The Politicization of Social Responsibility," NBER Working Papers 32869, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32869
    Note: CF
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32869.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G23 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors
    • G30 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - General
    • G34 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance
    • M14 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - Corporate Culture; Diversity; Social Responsibility

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:32869. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.