Three essays on corporate social responsibility (CSR) of entrepreneurial firms
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Date
2019
Authors
Wang, Yefeng
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Abstract
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a broad management concern, it is not only critical to every aspect of modern business practice, but is also deeply incorporated into a company’s daily operations via its values, norms, and decision-making process, etc. While there is an ever-increasing number of studies on CSR, many researchers have treated CSR as one single broad construct, its individual dimensions have been largely neglected. This dissertation takes the opportunity to address CSR by focusing on two dimensions: diversity and governance of three different entrepreneurial entities including clean-technology ventures, family firms in the United States and companies operate in emerging markets.
In the first essay, I explore the impact of board diversity, female director representation, to be specific, on venture performance in the context of the clean-tech industry. I posit that appointing female board of directors can help clean-tech ventures overcome legitimacy constraints. I also examine the moderating effect of venture size and environmental ideology, such that this impact is stronger for small firms, and it is stronger for clean-tech ventures operating in a high level of environmental ideology state. In the second essay, I investigate how family involvement influences corporate diversity and how does corporate governance mechanism moderate such effect. The results suggest that family involvement decreases the overall corporate diversity, but family firms present more diversity-related concerns than non-family firms. Meanwhile, I suggest that the adoption of dual-class share decreases family firms’ overall diversity. My third essay addresses the question of how corporate governance affect environmental information transparency directly and indirectly through seeking external verification, as well as how the legal and business environment moderates these relationships. I find that companies with strong corporate governance mechanisms are more likely to pursue external verification to alleviate traditional agency conflicts in the emerging markets. In addition, strong internal corporate governance leads to high environmental transparency directly and indirectly via seeking external verification. The legal and business environments moderate these relationships. Overall, these three essays in hopes of filling the gaps in the literature and advance the research in the areas of CSR, corporate governance, and entrepreneurship studies.
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Corporate Social Responsibility, Entrepreneurship, Corporate Governance