The Legal Origins of Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

The legal origin literature documents that civil and common law traditions have different impact on rules and economic outcomes. We contribute to this literature by investigating the relationship between corporate social responsibility and legal origins. Consistently with the main differences in historical and legal backgrounds and net of industry specific effects, the common law origin has a significant and positive impact on the Corporate Governance and Community Involvement domains, while the French legal tradition of civil law on the Human Resources domain. We also document that the lack of observable differences in the environmental domain can be explained by firms' progressive convergence to industry sustainability standards.