Abstract
Despite receiving a great deal of research attention, the effect of corporate philanthropy on shareholder value remains inconclusive. To address this issue, the present paper examines emotionality as an important factor based on which investors infer about the firm’s motive as well as the beneficiary’s worthiness and react accordingly. Consistent with attribution theory, our event study shows that announcements with more emotional expressions are associated with higher cumulative abnormal stock returns and the effect is stronger when investor attention is greater. We further find that the positive interaction effect between emotionality and investor attention is more pronounced for scandal-free firms than for firms with corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). The empirical evidence remains consistent under various robustness tests. The paper concludes with implications for future research and managerial practices.
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Notes
Using equal-weighted return (EWRETD) as an alternative proxy for Rm,t does not change our overall results. These additional analyses are available upon request.
Previous studies have also used company tickers to extract Google search interest. However, tickers with just a single letter (e.g., the ticker “F” for Ford Motor Company) or those with general meanings (e.g., the ticker “CAT” for Caterpillar Inc.) are likely to introduce noises to one’s empirical analysis, because it is impractical to separate the search interest directly related to these companies. Excluding observations associated with these tickers out of a sample can also lead to sample selection biases or generalizability concerns.
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Dang, A., Nguyen, T. Valuation Effect of Emotionality in Corporate Philanthropy. J Bus Ethics 173, 47–67 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04551-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04551-z