Terrorism and corporate social responsibility: Testing the impact of attacks on CSR behavior

Abstract

This is the first study to empirically examine how terrorism affects corporate social responsibility (CSR). Their relationship is not intuitive. The theoretical literature on CSR suggests that societal vicissitudes increase CSR demand, but can also incentivize self-regarding behavior. Historical accounts of terrorist attacks and other disasters confirm that they have at times elicited altruism and selfishness from the private sector. To clarify this variation in the impact of terrorism on CSR, we propose and test a rationalist explanation of firm behavior on an original dataset collected from the United Nations Global Compact Initiative that covers the CSR investment of 12,851 companies from 103 countries between 2002 and 2014. Across model specifications, evidence abounds for our thesis that companies condition CSR giving on the apparent severity of the terrorism threat to their organizational survival. Companies evidently behave selfishly even with charity.