German and US Investment Professionals’ Use of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosures in Their Personal Investment Decisions and Recommendations to Clients

Arnold, Markus C.; Hörner, Christoph; Martin, Patrick R.; Moser, Donald V. (February 2020). German and US Investment Professionals’ Use of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosures in Their Personal Investment Decisions and Recommendations to Clients (Unpublished)

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We conduct an experiment to examine investment professionals’ use of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures when making personal investment decisions or investment recommendations to clients. We predict and find that investment professionals are more willing to personally invest and recommend investment to a client when a firm discloses positive CSR performance than when it makes no CSR disclosures. Investment professionals’ decisions and recommendations are influenced by CSR disclosures both because, on average, they believe that better CSR performance results in better current and longer-term financial performance and because they value the societal benefits of CSR activities. We also find that investment professionals’ general beliefs regarding whether CSR activities benefit society affect how they assess firms’ CSR performance and their view of the relation between CSR performance and financial performance. Finally, investment professionals’ experience appears to protect them from the potential biasing effect of appealing pictures that accompany many CSR disclosures.

Item Type:

Working Paper

Division/Institute:

03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Department of Business Management > Institute for Accounting and Controlling > Managerial Accounting

UniBE Contributor:

Arnold, Markus Christopher

Subjects:

600 Technology > 650 Management & public relations
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 330 Economics

Language:

English

Submitter:

Lynn Carole Selhofer

Date Deposited:

12 Mar 2020 10:06

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:37

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.141321

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/141321

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