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Motivated by the ongoing debate on the costs and benefits of corporate social responsibility (CSR), we explore how talented managers view CSR investments. Based on nearly 20,000 observations across 17 years, our evidence reveals a nonmonotonic effect of managerial talent on CSR. Exploiting a novel measure of managerial ability, we find that talented managers view CSR investments favorably. However, only those with especially strong talent are in favor of CSR investments. For executives ranked above the 75th percentile in terms of managerial talent, an increase in managerial ability leads to more CSR investments, suggesting that these strongly talented managers perceive CSR as enhancing firm performance. In contrast, for those with weaker talent, CSR investments are negatively associated with managerial ability, implying that these weakly talented managers view CSR as a wasteful deployment of resources. Further evidence shows that our conclusion is unlikely confounded by endogeneity.

Exploiting the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) as an exogenous regulatory shock, we investigate whether board independence substitutes for external audit quality. Based on over 14,000 observations across 18 years, our difference-in-difference estimates show that firms forced to raise board independence are far less likely to employ a Big 4 auditor. In particular, board independence lowers the propensity to use a Big 4 auditor by approximately 38%. Firms with stronger board independence enjoy more effective governance and therefore do not need as much external audit quality as those with less effective governance do. Based on a natural experiment, our empirical strategy is far less vulnerable to endogeneity and is thus considerably more likely to show a causal effect, rather than merely an association.

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