Peer Influence of Corporate Social Responsibility Awards

This paper investigates how firms react to their peers who are promoted to corporate social responsibility (CSR) awards winners. By using the full set of non-winning peer firms as our control sample, our results show that a firm is more likely to disclose its CSR report or win CSR awards after its peer firms win CSR awards due to the incentivizing effect of awards on peers. Further, we obtain similar results using propensity score matching (PSM) and a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to mitigate endogeneity. The reactions to CSR are more pronounced when peer firms win their first CSR award. Key words: Corporate social responsibility, peer effects