Patrick Callery
UC Santa Barbara
Peer Eects and Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
Abstract
Firms employ strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR) to enhance profitability, manage risk, and maintain legitimacy. But firms face uncertainty over strategic outcomes and lack clear standards or expectations of corporate social performance (CSP). This study finds evidence of peer effects, or strategic mimicry, in strategic CSR through application of a novel empirical approach to analyzing social investment advisory ratings of CSP. Results suggest that firms routinely establish strategic goals for CSP based on the CSP of relevant peer firms, and further that firms tend to exhibit satisficing behavior in making changes to CSP relative to those strategic goals. This study contributes to a notable research agenda on the determinants of CSR and other non-market strategies by isolating the effect of peer performance on firm strategies and identifying conditions under which firms are more likely to follow peer strategies.
Biography
Patrick Callery is a PhD Candidate in the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and the Department of Economics at UC Santa Barbara. He holds prior graduate degrees in engineering, economics, and business administration, and has many years of private-sector experience in business and finance with a variety of corporations. Patrick’s academic research explores the role of information in creating incentives for firms to engage in strategic provision of social or environmental goods. His work seeks to extend theory from the fields of strategic management and behavioral economics through unique and robust empirical analyses rooted in applied microeconomics. Through an improved understanding of the motivations of corporations to provide social and environmental goods and resulting behaviors, he seeks to inform improved policy interventions and public awareness of corporate environmental impacts.