Non‐Investor Institutions' Site Visits and Corporate Social Responsibility*

Abstract

Previous studies show that institutional investors play an important role in shaping corporate social responsibility (CSR). The role of non‐investor institutions such as media firms is largely unexplored, especially in China. This study examines the impact of site visits by non‐investor institutions on visited firms' CSR ratings (excluding corporate governance (CG)) in China. The baseline result shows that site visits are associated with improved CSR ratings. The result is robust after controlling for potential endogeneity issues. It is also robust with alternative CSR ratings by different data providers. The channel test suggests that non‐investor institutions' site visits improve CSR ratings by increasing both CSR disclosure and actual CSR activities. To highlight the difference between our study and recent research on corporate site visits by institutional investors, we perform a further test to show that non‐investor institutions' visits improve the non‐CG aspect but not the CG aspect of CSR ratings while institutional investors' visits improve the CG aspect but not the non‐CG aspect of CSR ratings.