Foreign ownership and corporate philanthropy

Abstract We explore the relationship between foreign ownership and corporate philanthropy using donation data from a sample of Chinese listed companies. We manually collect ownership data on foreign investors in these companies from 2003 to 2018. We further collect data on the foreign investors’ jurisdictions of origin and find that these investors come from 39 jurisdictions. We show that foreign ownership significantly increases corporate donations. Instrumental variable regressions confirm this finding. We conclude that foreign investors inject the values of social responsibility to investees and thus increase corporate philanthropy. Our results are robust to a battery of robustness tests.