In this blogpost I wish to highlight the following article as a candidate for a set of Robustness Reports:
Cronqvist, H., & Yu, F. (2017). Shaped by their daughters: Executives, female socialization, and corporate social responsibility. Journal of Financial Economics, 126, 543-562. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2017.09.003
The abstract:
“Corporate executives managing some of the largest public companies in the U.S. are shaped by their daughters. When a firm’s chief executive officer (CEO) has a daughter, the corporate social responsibility rating (CSR) is about 9.1% higher, compared to a median firm. The results are robust to confronting several sources of endogeneity, e.g., examining first-born CEO daughters and CEO changes. The relation is strongest for diversity, but significant also for broader pro-social practices related to the environment and employee relations. Our study contributes to research on female socialization, heterogeneity in CSR policies, and plausibly exogenous determinants of CEOs’ styles.”
These findings appear practically relevant and have stimulated follow-up work; according to Google Scholar, the paper itself has been cited over 660 times. Nevertheless, I suspect that skeptics will find these results (and their effect sizes) somewhat implausible. The authors present a series robustness analyses themselves, but the only real robustness analysis is the robustness analysis that is conducted by a different research team. A practical obstable is that the data have not been made publicly available. Perhaps the authors would be willing to share the data, in case a Robustness Report is proposed?
More information on the Journal of Robustness Reports is available on this site and on BayesianSpectacles.
Author
References
Cronqvist, H., & Yu, F. (2017). Shaped by their daughters: Executives, female socialization, and corporate social responsibility. Journal of Financial Economics, 126, 543-562. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2017.09.003