2025年第30期(总第1071期)

演讲主题：Customer Response to Corporate Social Responsibility: Evidence from Mandatory CSR Spending

主讲人：邹宏 香港大学经管学院教授

主持人：李安泰 管理学院计算金融系副教授

活动时间：2025年5月9日（周五）10:00-11:30

活动地点：管院大楼121室

主讲人简介：

Joe Hong Zou is a professor of finance at University of Hong Kong.His research interests include corporate finance, corporate governance, risk management, financial services, and the Chinese financial market. He published 46 peer-reviewed journal articles in English and his research works appear in top finance and accounting journals, including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Management Science, Journal of Accounting and Economics. He was ranked as one of the HKU Scholars in the world’s Top 1% based on Thomson Clarivate Analytics’Essential Science Indicators in the 10-year period (2008-2018). He is a research fellow at the Center of China Insurance and Social Security Research, and is an associate editor for British Accounting Review.

活动简介：

We investigate whether customers value firms’corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance through their purchasing behavior. Our study utilizes difference-in-differences (DID) analyses, leveraging Section 135 of the 2013 Indian Companies Act as a legal shock. This law change mandates that firms meeting certain size criteria allocate a minimum of 2% of the pre-tax profit to CSR initiatives. We conduct product-level analyses to isolate customer responses from confounding factors such as changes in firms’product mix. Our results show a significant increase in product-level sales following the implementation of the CSR spending mandate. This effect exists for both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) firms, with a stronger impact on B2C firms. Firms in highly competitive industries and those with lower pre-existing advertising expenditure show more pronounced effects. Despite the increased costs associated with CSR spending, firms experience higher profitability and higher R&D investments post-mandate. We extend the existing literature on voluntary CSR initiatives by shedding light on the product market outcomes of mandatory CSR spending and highlighting a bright side of CSR spending regulations.