Private Entrepreneurs of Communist Party Members and Corporate Social Responsibility: Evidence from Chinese Private Enterprise Survey

This paper examines whether private entrepreneurs with communist party member status affect corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of private enterprises. Our empirical result reveals that firms led by private entrepreneurs of communist party members are significantly associated with higher CSR score. The result is robust to confronting several sources of endogeneity, e.g., re-examining the result using propensity score matching (PSM), entropy balancing (EB) and Heckman two-stage estimation, removing the influence of local religious culture. Further, the observed positive relation is particularly sharper for firms with party organization embedding and a good external legal environment. Our findings highlight entrepreneur political affiliation as an important driver of socially responsible corporate decision making.