Foreign Ownership and Corporate Social Responsibility: Evidence from China

This paper employs the data of corporate social responsibility rating score of A-share listed companies in China from 2009 to 2018 as a sample to verify the impacts of foreign ownership on corporate social responsibility. Furthermore, this paper explores the moderating role of legal institutional distance and economic institutional distance in the impact of foreign ownership on corporate social responsibility. The empirical results of panel data models show that: Firstly, foreign ownership has a significant positive impact on corporate social responsibility. Secondly, legal institutional distance and economic institutional distance have a positive moderating role in the impacts of foreign ownership on corporate social responsibility. The results of propensity score matching, two-stage least squares and alternative variables methods also give strong backing to the above conclusions. Finally, this paper puts forward that China’s listed companies are supposed to make full use of the supervision power of foreign ownership to promote corporate social responsibility.