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Doing Good Business by Hiring Directors with Foreign Experience

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Abstract

Using a manually collected dataset on the overseas experiences of directors of Chinese listed firms, we examine the effects of returnee directors on firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement. Our results show that returnee directors significantly improve their firms’ CSR engagement. The positive relationship between the percentage of returnee directors and CSR engagement is more significant when a firm is in a competitive industry, when a firm has no government ownership, when a firm’s CEO is not politically connected, and when a firm’s CEO is older. Furthermore, we find that only long-term foreign professional or academic experience matters, whereas short-term visiting experience does not. Finally, our results are robust after controlling for endogeneity. Therefore, this paper offers clear policy implications by suggesting that hiring more returnees as corporate directors is an efficient way to enhance firms’ CSR, which may be of particular interest to regulators in emerging markets.

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Notes

  1. On September 11, 2008, the Gansu Health Bureau released an announcement that Sanlu Corporation, one of the largest dairy producers in China, had placed products contaminated by melamine on the market. Three critical consequences resulted from this contamination. First, more than 290,000 people (most of them children) were poisoned, leading to the deaths of six infants (Kong 2012). Second, twenty-two dairy producers in China, with total market shares of over 90% in liquid milk and over 50% in powdered milk, failed quality examinations due to melamine contamination (Dai et al. 2013). Third, the New Zealand dairy cooperative Fonterra, which comprised business partners and shareholders of Sanlu Group, wrote down the carrying value of its investments by NZ$ 139 million. In fact, the top managers of these dairy producers knew that their products contained melamine harmful to humans, but they were concerned about the loss of short-term profits and the damage to firm reputation if they recalled the products from the market. Currently, most Chinese families prefer milk products imported from New Zealand, Holland, and Japan. Therefore, Chinese milk companies lost their market shares and experienced financial distress.

  2. One anonymous referee raises the concern that director turnover may challenge our finding because turnover effectively changes the returnee-director ratio. Due to the limited sample observations, we did not filter the firms with director turnover. To alleviate the concern raised by the referee, we conduct a robustness check in an unreported regression. In the robustness check, we define a new dummy variable to indicate whether a firm experiences director turnover during the sample period. Then, we add the interaction term between overseas director ratio and the dummy variable of director turnover to the regression. The result shows that the coefficient of the interaction term is insignificant and that the coefficient of overseas director ratio remains positive and highly significant. This result suggests that our finding is not affected by director turnover. These results are available upon request.

  3. We remove the control variable for government ownership from the subsample analysis when we split the sample firms into with- and without-government-ownership subsamples. We also remove the control variable for leverage when we split the sample firms into high- and low-leverage subsamples. We thank the anonymous referee for this comment.

  4. In Table 8, we measure whether a firm has been included in the Running’s Report. Thus, the sample firms include all public firms listed on the Chinese stock market. This differs from previous test samples, which comprise only firms included in the Running’s report.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor, Prof. Joelle Vanhamme, two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions. We also thank Shasha Liu, Juan Luo, Yawen Qiu, Rui Shen, and Limin Xu for their comments and suggestions that have greatly improved the paper. We also wish to thank the participants of the 2015 Auckland Finance Meeting, New Zealand, and the seminar in the Sun Yat-sen University in 2016 for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. Dongmin Kong acknowledges the financial support of National Natural Science Foundation of China (71372130 and 71173078).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Finance, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, 555 Liutai Avenue, Chengdu, 611130, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China

    Jian Zhang

  2. School of Finance, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, 182# Nanhu Avenue, Wuhan, 430073, Hubei, People’s Republic of China

    Dongmin Kong

  3. School of Economics and Finance, Massey Business School, Massey University – Albany Campus, North Shore Mail Centre, Auckland, New Zealand

    Ji Wu

  4. School of Economics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 1037# Luoyu Road, Wuhan, 430074, Hubei, People’s Republic of China

    Dongmin Kong

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Correspondence to Ji Wu.

Appendix

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Table 10 Variable definition
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Zhang, J., Kong, D. & Wu, J. Doing Good Business by Hiring Directors with Foreign Experience. J Bus Ethics 153, 859–876 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3416-z

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