Corporate social responsibility and the pollution haven hypothesis: evidence from multinationals’ investment decision in China

Abstract

This paper tests the pollution haven hypothesis by examining the relationship between environmental regulation and foreign investment with consideration of the role of corporate social responsibility, which has so far been neglected. Using multinationals' investment data from China, our results in general support the pollution haven hypothesis that less stringent environmental regulation is more attractive for multinationals to invest in China, but high social responsibility can counteract attractiveness of weak environmental regulation.

Board gender diversity and corporate environmental performance: The moderating role of family and dual‐class majority ownership structures

“…Although not as widely used in management as the KLD database, the CSRHub data have recently been used in the context of social responsibility both in academic U.S. (Cruz et al, ) and Asian contexts such as India and China (Bu, Liu, Wagner, & Yu, ) and practitioner environments (Gidwani, ).…”

“…The positive relationship between board gender diversity and firms' environmental performance will be higher in dual-class than nondual-class firms. Although not as widely used in management as the KLD database, the CSRHub data have recently been used in the context of social responsibility both in academic U.S. (Cruz et al, 2014) and Asian contexts such as India and China (Bu, Liu, Wagner, & Yu, 2013) and practitioner environments (Gidwani, 2013 This aggregation over various sources and scaling to yield interval data that can be meaningfully compared is an advantage of CSRHub data over other widely used data such as the KLD data that uses a (0,1) system for coding strengths and weaknesses in disparate categories, which has predominantly 0 ratings (with little variance over time) and where strengths are often correlated significantly with weaknesses for the same period (Chatterji, Levine, & Toffel, 2009), creating a problem when researchers net strengths (e.g., pollution prevention) against weaknesses (e.g., production of agricultural chemicals) and compound the problem by often netting across categories (e.g., environment, governance, human rights, and community). These data, based on the seminal Anderson and Reeb (2003) study, were augmented with data from Anderson, Duru, and Reeb (2009) and Anderson, Reeb, and Zhao (2012) We also used, as a control variable, the industrial sector that the company belongs to (Gonzales-Benito & Gonzales-Benito, 2006), utilizing the two-digit SIC code and following the classification scheme for high-polluting industries utilized by Delmas and Toffel (2008).…”

For green or not for green? The effect of cooperation goals and type on environmental performance

“…The CSRHub database measures the CSR performance of 17,913 worldwide public and private companies. CSRHub data have recently been used in the context of social responsibility in academic contexts in the United States (Cruz, Larraza‐Kintana, Garces‐Galdea, & Berrone, 2014), Asian contexts such as in India and China (Bu, Liu, Wagner, & Yu, 2013), and practitioner environments (Gidwani, 2013).…”

Mission Statements and the Sustainability Communication

“…While not as widely used in management as the KLD database, the CSRHub has recently been used in the context of social responsibility both in academic (Bu et al 2013, Cruz et al, 2014 and practitioner environments (Gidwani, 2013).…”