The effect of CEO tenure on external vs. internal CSR: The moderating effect of visibility and slack

Building on the literature on stakeholder theory, upper echelons, CEO social capital, and the executive life cycle, we empirically investigate the longitudinal effect of CEO tenure on external and internal CSR. Using an 8-year sample of 299 U.S. firms from the S&P 500 list (N = 1791 firm-year observations), KLD data for CSR, and archival and publicly available sources for CEO, governance and financial data, the findings support our hypotheses that CEO tenure will be positively related to externally directed social investments while negatively related to internal social investments. Furthermore, we propose and test the moderating effect of two important contingencies relevant to the firm's social investments: firm visibility and slack availability and find that both variables affect the magnitude of the differential effects of CEO tenure on firm's CSR