To Talk or to Walk? Celebrity CEOs and Differentiated Corporate Social Responsibility Strategies of Chinese Listed Enterprises

ABSTRACT By analysing the role of prestigious official media awards on CEOs, this paper explores the outcome of the conduction of substantive or strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR) enacted by celebrity CEOs. Based on the awards information uncovered by CCTV, Forbes, China Business News, Fortune and China Times, we find that enterprises notably increase substantive CSR after their CEOs have won the distinguished awards, which indicates that celebrity CEOs can exert a significant increment on corporate charitable donations, whereas no obvious improvement in strategic CSR (CSR information disclosure) has been observed. Concerning on exploring the potential mechanism, we confirm that celebrity CEOs could firmly induce more donations by enhancing CEO power and increasing corporate risk taking. Heterogeneity analysis implies that female celebrity CEOs and celebrity CEOs with socialist ideological imprint both have a pronounced effect on fostering charitable donations. Besides, the positive effect of celebrity CEOs on donations is more prominent in non‐SOEs, high media exposure enterprises and regions with strong collectivism culture. The findings of this paper provide a crucial supplement to the study of celebrity CEOs and differentiated CSR fields and have practical implications for how the Chinese capital market can stimulate managers to actively undertake social responsibility.