Call of Duty: CEOs’ Poverty Experience and Education Philanthropy

ABSTRACT Objective Poverty, as a profound social structural issue, affects not only individuals’ economic conditions but also their educational opportunities and social mobility. This study explores how CEOs’ early‐life poverty experiences influence their firms’ commitment to education‐related philanthropy. Method Using manually collected data from Chinese listed firms between 2016 and 2020, we conduct multivariate regression analysis. To address potential endogeneity, we apply propensity score matching (PSM), difference‐in‐differences (DID), and two‐stage least squares (2SLS) methods and further enhance robustness by suppressing alternative explanations, introducing time trends, and controlling for high‐dimensional fixed effects. Results We find that firms led by CEOs with poverty experience donate significantly more to education initiatives than those without such experience, particularly when CEOs have higher educational attainment. Robustness checks confirm the reliability of our findings. Conclusion This study highlights how early‐life adversity shapes CEOs’ social responsibility perceptions and philanthropic behavior, enriching the understanding of the interplay between individual experience and corporate social initiatives aimed at alleviating social inequality.