Get access Abstract This study examines how changes in state corporate tax rates affect corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance among U.S. firms. Using staggered state-level tax reforms and a difference-in-differences (DiD) design, we identify an asymmetric causal effect: tax cuts significantly enhance CSR performance by reducing concerns, whereas tax increases only marginally weaken CSR strengths. Drawing primarily on signaling theory, complemented by slack resource and stakeholder perspectives, we argue that tax cuts expand financial slack, enabling firms to use CSR as a positive signal of financial strength, long-term orientation, and responsible use of tax savings. In contrast, firms avoid cutting CSR significantly after tax hikes to prevent negative signaling. In support of the theories, our heterogeneity analyses show that these effects are stronger among financially constrained firms and are concentrated in material CSR issues that are financially relevant to investors. A domain-level analysis further reveals that tax increases reduce environmental strengths, while tax cuts lower concerns related to employee relations, diversity, and environmental practices. These findings highlight how tax policy shapes CSR through its impact on financial flexibility and stakeholder expectation, offering implications for corporate strategy and public policy.

While the drastic physical impacts of climate change and related natural hazards are increasingly apparent, little is known about the long-term behavioral consequences of climate change-related experiences. Psychological evidence suggests that climate change (CC)-related experiences induce people to make more climate-friendly choices. Building on Upper Echelons Theory and relevant psychological literature, we investigate whether early-life natural hazard experiences of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are associated with more climate-friendly policies during their tenure. Our sample covers decisions taken between 1991 and 2018 by 447 US-born CEOs. While we observe an effect of hazard experiences on climate policies, we do not observe the same effect when focusing only on CC-related experiences. This result is robust across different measures of corporate climate performance.

This paper examines the impact of climate risks on the debt structure of a sample of U.S. firms from 2002 through 2020. Climate risks—mainly physical, regulatory, and transition risks—are associated with a concentrated debt structure for the affected firms. However, when climate risks propagate through the channels of expected bankruptcy costs and sustainability, they are associated with a more diversified debt structure. Additionally, climate risks asymmetrically impact the relationship between access to finance and debt structure. Results from a quasi-natural experiment reaffirm the impact of climate risks on debt structure.

Institutional common ownership of firm pairs in the same industry increases the likelihood of a preexisting social connection among their CEOs. We establish this relationship using a quasi-natural experiment that exploits institutional mergers combined with firms’ hiring events and detailed information on CEO biographies. In addition, for peer firms, gaining a CEO connection from a hiring firm’s CEO appointment correlates with higher returns on assets, stock market returns, and decreasing product similarity between companies. We find evidence consistent with common owners allocating CEO connections to shape managerial decisionmaking and increase portfolio firms’ performance.

We investigate whether employees in Germany benefit from public bank guarantees in terms of employment probability and wages. To that end, we exploit the removal of public bank guarantees in Germany in 2001 as a quasi-natural experiment. Our results show that bank guarantees lead to higher employment, but lower wage prospects for employees after working in affected establishments. Overall the results suggest that employees do not benefit from bank guarantees.

We study how banks use “regulatory adjustments” to inflate their regulatory capital ratios and whether this depends on forbearance on the part of national authorities. Using the 2011 EBA capital exercise as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that banks substantially inflated their levels of regulatory capital via a reduction in regulatory adjustments — without a commensurate increase in book equity and without a reduction in bank risk. We document substantial heterogeneity in regulatory capital inflation across countries, suggesting that national authorities forbear their domestic banks to meet supranational requirements, with a focus on short-term economic considerations.