Bondholders are arm’s-length lenders with limited insider information. In this paper, we explore whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities could work as an information channel for bondholders to better understand the riskiness of bond-issuing firms. We find a significant negative relation between CSR scores and corporate bond yield spread, especially for firms which invest heavily in diversity and community relations, suggesting that CSR firms are less risky. The result is robust to different model specifications and endogeneity issues. In addition, the negative relation between the CSR score and bond yield spread is significant only if a firm has a strong internal governance mechanism.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate universal banks as an important source of external funding and their effects on borrowing firms’ innovation outputs.Design/methodology/approach: The authors employ regression analyses including a difference-in-difference approach and a two-sided matching method to ensure the robustness of the findings. The authors further explore some potential channels and boundary conditions for the main findings.Findings: The authors find that borrowing from universal banks is negatively associated with the quantity of firm innovation, but not the quality of firm innovation. The authors document that borrowing firms reduce their R&D expenditures and rely more on external partners to produce innovation outputs after loan originations from universal banks. The negative relation between universal bank lending and the quantity of firm innovation is more prominent for unrelated innovation and for financially constrained firms.Research limitations/implications: The evidence reveals that universal banks may use their informational advantage and market power to limit their corporate borrowers’ investment in innovation activities.Originality/value: The paper extends the line of research on the source of financing and firm innovation, and establishes a robust relationship between capital market and product market.

In this study, we focus on managerial incentives provided by debt-like compensation and further investigate whether and to what extent such managerial incentives may affect CEOs’ decisions on risk management. Building on cumulative prospect theory and instrumental stakeholder theory, we propose that CEOs tend to have risk-reduction incentives if they are paid with debt in their own firms, and that firm engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities can mediate the relationship between debt-like compensation and firm risk taking. In addition, we posit that the mediated relationship between CEO debt-like compensation and firm risk taking is contingent, and we propose environmental dynamism and munificence as two such contingencies that moderate the mediated process. Using a large longitudinal dataset of nonfinancial U.S. firms, we document strong supportive evidence for these hypotheses.

Human capital and labor costs are crucial for the sustainable growth of organizations, and take a vital role in affecting bank efficiency and banking power. This research empirically investigates whether labor employment protection affects banking power. The analysis exploits the staggered adoption of Wrongful Discharge Laws (WDLs) as a quasi-exogenous shock to employment protection. A Difference-In-Difference research design is implemented to study the impacts of WDLs on banking power, and the main results show that there exists a decline of banking power for commercial banks headquartered in states that adopt employment protection. This study further tests the main mechanism through which WDLs affect banking power and finds that the impaired banking power is primarily due to cost inefficiency but not profit inefficiency. Moreover, the adoption of wrongful discharge laws increases commercial banks’ labor costs and induces bank risk-taking.