Executives' regulatory experiences and corporate social responsibility

This paper investigates the impact of executives' regulatory experience on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Based on manually collected executive work experience, we find that executive regulatory experience has a significant negative impact on corporate CSR. To establish causality, we introduce a policy exogenous shock to construct a difference-in-differences design and show that the results remain unchanged. Finally, heterogeneity analysis shows that the above effect is more significant in non-state-owned enterprises. Mechanism analysis suggests that companies with executives who have regulatory experience may receive more government resources, thereby reducing the need to obtain resources through social responsibility activities.