Are red managers greener? The relationship of communist CEOs and corporate environmental responsibility in China

Purpose As China's only ruling party, will the Communist Party influence corporate decisions? The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how the political ideology of CEOs affects the environmental responsibility of Chinese family firms and its effects on Corporate Environmental Responsibility (CER), in addition to a cohesive set of corporate governance contingency factors. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a series of the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression estimates and two-stage approach to examine four main hypotheses, based on 7,824 observations corresponding to 1,919 family firms in China from 2004 to 2015. Findings The study's findings show that CEOs imprinted with communist ideology are significantly positively related to CER in family firms, that the moderating role of ownership concentration is not significant, that board independence positively moderates the focal relationship and that CEO duality negatively moderates this relationship. Originality/value The paper expands the research of CEOs' political ideology to the ecological context, which are of significance to both theory and practice.