Executives' Academic Experience And Corporate Philanthropy

Corporate charitable donation,as an important part of corporate social responsibility,has attracted more and more scholars' attention,and has become a hot issue in corporate social responsibility research.And charitable donations are also financial decision-making behaviors of enterprises,and their decision-making is influenced by the cognitive foundation and values of executives,especially the CEO and chairman.In recent years,more and more government officials or university teachers have entered the company from the government agencies and institutions to take on the role of CEO or chairman or start a business.Some of them have academic experience in teaching,research institutes or associations in universities.People,this has formed the phenomenon of "literati going to sea" in China.How do these people with academic experience entering the company as CEO and chairman have an impact on corporate social responsibility compared with CEOs and chairman without academic experience,especially the impact of corporate charitable donations,how the nature of different property rights,whether there are political connections and interregional different institutional environments affect the relationship between executive academic experience and corporate charitable donations is an issue to be discussed in this article,and few existing studies have studied it.The answers to these questions in this article provide theoretical basis for improving corporate governance and improving corporate social responsibility performance.In view of this,this paper uses the data of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2017,based on the three main theories of high-level echelon theory,corporate social responsibility theory and planned behavior theory,using normative analysis and empirical analysis methods,using Stata software,Descriptive statistical analysis,correlation analysis,regression analysis,mechanism testing,and robustness testing were described.This article explores the impact of the CEO and chairman's academic experience on corporate charitable donations,and examines how the nature of property rights,political connections,and the institutional environment affect the relationship between the two.Heckman two-stage approach,propensity score matching,and test for robustness,change the explained variables and explanatory variables,exclude the sample data of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.The study found that companies with academic experience in CEO had 0.002% higher ratio in total charitable donations as a percentage of total assets than those without academic experience,which is significant at the level of 1%,had 0.003% higher ratio in total corporate charitable donations in their operating income than companies without academic experience,which is significant at the level of 5%.Companies with academic experience in chairman had 0.002% higher ratio in total charitable donations as a percentage of total assets than those without academic experience,had 0.004% higher ratio in total corporate charitable donations in their operating income than companies without academic experience,which are significant at the level of 1%.Based on the discussion of the nature of property rights,political connections,and the institutional environment,it is found that the academic experience of the CEO and the chairman has a more significant positive effect on the charitable donation of non-state-owned enterprises,politically-linked enterprises,and companies with better institutional environments.The conclusions of this paper are still valid after controlling for endogenous problems and other robustness tests.The contributions of this paper are:(1)Enriching the research on the personal characteristics of senior executives and corporate charitable donations,and expanding the application scope of high-level echelon theory.(2)Revealed the positive impact of senior management with academic experience on corporate social responsibility,demonstrated the contribution of senior management with academic experience to the society outside the classroom,and effectively helped the government share social responsibility.(3)It has important guiding significance for Chinese enterprises to improve corporate social responsibility performance through corporate governance system arrangements.Promoting corporate social responsibility performance through the arrangement of senior management team members is one of the relatively effective methods.(4)Provide reference and reference for the Chinese government to promulgate relevant laws and regulations and guidance in the field of corporate governance system arrangement of listed companies...