This study examines whether shareholders are sensitive to corporations' environmental footprint. Specifically, I conduct an event study around the announcement of corporate news related to environment for all US publicly traded companies from 1980 to 2009. In keeping with the view that environmental corporate social responsibility (CSR) generates new and competitive resources for firms, I find that companies reported to behave responsibly toward the environment experience a significant stock price increase, whereas firms that behave irresponsibly face a significant decrease. Extending this view of "environment-as-a-resource," I posit that the value of environmental CSR depends on external and internal moderators. First, I argue that external pressure to behave responsibly towards the environment-which has increased dramatically over recent decades-exacerbates the punishment for eco-harmful behavior and reduces the reward for eco-friendly initiatives. This argument is supported by the data: over time, the negative stock market reaction to eco-harmful behavior has increased, while the positive reaction to eco-friendly initiatives has decreased. Second, I argue that environmental CSR is a resource with decreasing marginal returns and insurance-like features. In keeping with this view, I find that the positive (negative) stock market reaction to eco-friendly (-harmful) events is smaller for companies with higher levels of environmental CSR.

This study examines the effect of shareholder proposals related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) on financial performance. Specifically, I focus on CSR proposals that pass or fail by a small margin of votes. The passage of such “close call” proposals is akin to a random assignment of CSR to companies and hence provides a quasi-experiment to study the effect of CSR on performance. I find that the adoption of close call CSR proposals leads to positive announcement returns and superior accounting performance, implying that these proposals are value enhancing. When I examine the channels through which companies benefit from CSR, I find that labor productivity and sales growth increase after the vote. Finally, I document that close call CSR proposals differ from non-close proposals along several dimensions. Accordingly, although my results imply that adopting close call CSR proposals is beneficial to companies, they do not necessarily imply that CSR proposals are beneficial in general. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2038 . This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance.

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This study examines whether product market competition affects corporate social responsibility (CSR). To obtain exogenous variation in product market competition, I exploit a quasi-natural experiment provided by large import tariff reductions that occurred between 1992 and 2005 in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, I find that domestic companies respond to tariff reductions by increasing their engagement in CSR. This finding supports the view of "CSR as a competitive strategy" that allows companies to differentiate themselves from their foreign rivals. Overall, my results highlight that trade liberalization is an important factor that shapes CSR practices. 5 The sample period considered in this study has witnessed a decreasing trend in import tariffs. Accordingly, there are only two instances of large tariff rate increases. This prevents me from conducting the reverse analysis, i.e., studying whether companies adjust their social engagement following a decrease in product market competition. 13 This decrease is representative of the average change in import tariff rates across all manufacturing industries during the sample period. The corresponding average is −0.2 percentage point per year as well. 19 Interestingly, the coefficient is smaller for the twofold cutoff (0.251) and larger for the fourfold cutoff (0.504), compared to the coefficient of 0.363 for the threefold cutoff. This pattern suggests that the increase in CSR is monotonic in the extent to which foreign product market competition increases.