A Study On Executives' Military Experience And Corporate Charitable Donation

With the rapid development of China’s economy,the overall living standard of the people has been rising,and the gap between the rich and the poor in society is gradually increasing.As the main way to implement the third distribution and achieve common prosperity,charitable giving has become a hot topic in the field of corporate behaviour and corporate governance.Senior executives play a key role in corporate decision-making and executive characteristics are of great concern to society.So,whether executives’ military experience affects the charitable giving behaviour of the companies they work for is the main research question of this paper.This paper uses the sample data of A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2012 to 2019 to screen out executives with military experience.The empirical study reveals that(1)the level of charitable giving is higher in enterprises where executives with military experience are employed;and(2)state-owned enterprises weaken the positive effect of executives’ military experience on the level of corporate charitable giving.In order to test the robustness of the empirical results,this paper adds lagged variables and the test results show that the hypothesis still holds.In addition,this paper uses a case study approach to analyse the influence of military experience on corporate charitable giving,and also finds that military experience executives can increase corporate commitment to charitable giving.Through empirical research and case study analysis,this paper concludes that:(1)military senior executives can increase corporate charitable giving;(2)there is a moderating effect of the nature of property rights between military senior executives and corporate charitable giving;(3)there is still more room for the development of philanthropy in China.Finally,the paper also proposes policy recommendations to raise awareness of corporate social responsibility,guide enterprises to participate in the provision of public services,strengthen the training of military-calendar executives,and enhance the ideological and moral education of executives.The main contributions are: firstly,this paper adopts empirical research and case studies to provide new explanations for the relationship between executives’ military experience and corporate social responsibility based on branding theory and other factors;secondly,military experience creates a unique branding of values,and executives with military experience have a higher sense of social responsibility than those with non-military experience,therefore,companies can select and train executives with military experience at the right time according to their strategic development;thirdly,it can play a role in promoting the third distribution to achieve common prosperity.