This paper examines how Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSI) affects the employees of irresponsible companies. Using an employer-employee matched dataset from Brazil and two major CSI events involving large Brazilian companies, we first evaluate firms’ turnover rates after CSI scandals. Employing a synthetic control method, we find that CSI sharply increases the turnover rates of the offending companies at the time of the event, compared to the synthetic counterfactuals. We then expand the investigation to the individual level, showing that employees that leave the irresponsible firms spend more time unemployed and make less money overtime compared to people leaving companies not involved in any scandal. This paper provides large-scale empirical evidence of the impact of CSI effects on workers, suggesting a reputational spillover effect from irresponsible firms to their employees.

Keywords: corporate social irresponsibility; event study; human capital; difference-in-differences; stigma; synthetic control.

This paper presents an innovative methodology to measure firm environmental disclosure. This toolkit can do textual, sentiment, and more importantly, visual analysis of firms annual and sustainability reports. To showcase the application of the toolkit, we apply it to a sample of 542 reports from 69 Brazilian firms over ten years (2011-2020). We find that, over time, firms increase the amount of environmental text, use more emotional content (both positive and negative), and adopt more green colors on their reports. This time trend is particularly prevalent among firms operating in contested areas, such as the Amazon rainforest. Interestingly, while reports become literally “greener,” firm ESG controversies score declines, suggesting a decoupling between reported actions and the true behavior of firms. This study contributes to the non-market literature by providing a more holistic tool to measure environmental disclosure.

Keywords: environmental disclosure; greenwashing; impression management; natural language processing; visual analysis.

In this paper, we examine the ontological and epistemological properties of Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSiR), in order to provide an evaluation of its current status as a concept. More specifically, we analyze CSiR definitions, operationalization, related concepts, and empirical evidence in the business and management literature. We find that scholars adopt three different approaches to define CSiR: the stakeholder-based approach, the typification approach, and the reductionist approach. Moreover, our analysis shows that the field of CSiR is being developed with a strong quantitative orientation, and that the phenomenon is explored mostly on the context of large and multinational companies. Based on our findings, we provide a definition of CSiR and recommendations for future research in three main areas: (1) CSiR conceptualization and theory development; (2) methodology and measurement enhancements and (3) exploration of new contexts.

Key-words: corporate social irresponsibility; corporate irresponsibility; corporate misconduct; corporate social responsibility; literature review.

In this paper I investigate the impact of Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSI) in shareholder activism. Specifically, I posit that companies with higher levels of CSI will be more targeted by activist shareholders. However, linguistic obfuscation in sustainability reports will weaken this relationship. Using data from the S&P 500 firms, I find that as the severity of the CSI events increases, measured by the dollar amount of fines, so do the number of ESG-related shareholder proposals. Notwithstanding, this relationship is attenuated by the level of obfuscation in sustainability reports. The opposite happens for firms that have small but frequent violations, suggesting that shareholders react differently to firms that misbehave “badly” vs. firms that misbehave often (when those violations are small). This paper contributes to the literature on shareholder activism, information disclosure and corporate social irresponsibility.

Keywords: corporate social irresponsibility; misconduct; shareholder activism; obfuscation; ESG.