PurposeThe study aims to understand the role of accountant in corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice.Design/methodology/approachIn this study, the authors examine whether and how chief financial officer (CFO) accounting expertise and previous work experience influence voluntary CSR disclosure, using textual analysis and natural language processing (NLP) techniques. The authors find that firms' CFOs with accounting expertise disclose more CSR issues in their 10-K reports. Overall, this study provides evidence of the impact of CFOs' professional and personal attributes on voluntary CSR disclosure in corporate annual reports. This study has important implications to investors and policy makers in the context of CSR disclosure regulations in annual reports.FindingsOverall, this study provides evidence of the impact of CFOs' professional and personal attributes on voluntary CSR disclosure in corporate annual reports. This study has important implications to practitioners and policy makers in the context of CSR disclosure regulations in annual reports.Research limitations/implicationsThere is an inherent limitation of textual analysis as the tool tries to read key words from the text.Practical implicationsThis finding is useful for policy maker and investors as CSR is known to have impact on the share price.Originality/valueThis paper is the first attempt to find out accountants' role in CSR activities, which has not been examined in the prior literature.

PurposeThe authors study whether CEO beauty influences management guidance.Design/methodology/approachThe authors calculate an attractiveness score based on facial symmetry and perform regression analyses to examine the relation between CEO beauty and management guidance.FindingsThe authors find that attractive CEOs are more likely to issue voluntary management earnings guidance. After controlling for this appearance-based self-selection, the authors document that management forecasts provided by attractive CEOs are more optimistic yet less precise. Consistent with this result, the authors find that analysts' consensus forecast error following management forecasts made by attractive CEOs is larger than such error following management forecasts made by unattractive CEOs. The authors further find that the perceived credibility of management forecasts by attractive CEOs is not different from that by unattractive CEOs.Originality/valueThese findings suggest that attractive CEOs are more active but less skillful in issuing management forecasts. This adds to the emerging accounting literature on the relation between facial appearance and information delivery.

PurposePulchronomics studies the economics of beauty. The purpose of this paper is to research CEO pulchronomics by examining whether a beauty premium exists in CEO compensation and whether this beauty premium is justified by differences in CEO performance.Design/methodology/approachThe authors calculate a facial attractiveness scores (FAS) based on facial symmetry, facial structure and the golden ratio. The authors then perform OLS regressions to examine the effect of CEO beauty on CEO compensation and firm performances.FindingsThe authors find that base salaries for attractive CEOs are higher than those for unattractive CEOs, but incentive pays for attractive CEOs are not different from those for unattractive CEOs. The latter is likely due to the fact that attractive CEOs do not outperform unattractive CEOs in operations, innovation, corporate social responsibility and financial reporting quality.Originality/valueSince the CEO beauty premium is not supported by the superior performance of attractive CEOs, this paper provides new evidence of appearance discrimination in CEO compensation.

This paper shows that local shareholders lead firms to engage in corporate social responsibility activities locallycorporate community responsibility (CCR). Motivated by the stakeholder theory, we find that mutual funds investing in local firms tend to increase CCR, remarkably in consumer oriented industry. Our identification strategy suggests a causal effect of local shareholders on CCR. Local shareholders and their firms employ CCR as business strategy and benefit themselves financially. Our results indicate that CCR tends to increase firm performance measured with Tobin's Q and operating cash flows, especially in the consumer-oriented industries where customer relations are critical. In addition, local shareholders (i.e. local funds) of higher CCR firms enjoy greater fund flows.

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