Does institutional ownership and internationalization affect corporate social responsibility in emerging economy firms? An empirical evidence from India

Abstract

The preference of firm corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending is shaped by different groups of owners and the institutional environment in which the firm operates. This paper aims to study the heterogeneity among the controlling groups and firms’ internationalization in influencing the CSR decision in emerging economy firms. This paper draws understanding from institutional theory to inspect the propensities of various ownership groups such as lending institutions (LI), domestic mutual funds (MF) and foreign institutional investors (FIIs). The empirical analysis was conducted from a sample of 1,594 unique Bombay stock exchange (BSE)-listed non-financial Indian firms during the 2014–2019 period using Tobit panel regression analysis. The findings reveal that firms’ CSR activities are impacted differently by ownership share of different types of institutional investors after controlling for firm-level resources and capabilities. Lending institutions, FIIs and MF are supportive of CSR investments by firms along with international investments by the firm. Further, the results show that the CSR spend is positively influenced by the business group affiliation of the firm compared to the unaffiliated group of firms. The analysis has implications for both institutional investors and multinational firms. In the merging market context, managers and owners who target long term strategies such as CSR will benefit from increasing shareholdings of creditors (lending institutions). They can also take steps to improve their transparency and corporate governance structure so as to attract foreign institutional investments, thus, in turn, helping the internationalization process of the firm. This paper considers the role of the diverseness of the ownership institutional investors along with the moderating effect of business group affiliation of the firm and international investments in impacting the CSR spend. This disparity has not been previously studied with the latest data in an emerging economy context.