Corporate social responsibility: Institutional ownership and gender diversity board effects in the food and beverage industry

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility refers to the companies’ actions toward the society wealth with the aim of improving quality of lives, therefore firms are not anymore concerned only on their own business and the maximization of their profits, but instead they act in the pursuit of global well-being. Nowadays, these responsibilities are seen also as a source of competitive advantage in a diverse and globalized market, even though for some industries such liabilities represent more a compulsory duty, as the case of food and beverage industry. Indeed, it deserves a particular attention because of the strong impact that it has on the society motivated by its highly dependence on natural resources, added to the fact that in the last decades it has caused several societal problems, such as obesity and alcoholic addictions issues. At the corporate level, the decisions about which measures to adopt in order to address the social responsibility matter are taken at the board level, which in turn might be influenced by the shareholders’ composition. In this respect, this study aims firstly at analysing how the corporate social responsibility ratings are affected by different gender board composition in food and beverage major companies. Secondly the effects of having institutions composing the shareholders’ meeting. Moreover, as the matter can be divided into different subcategories, through several regression analysis it has been showed how female directors have a significant impact on the different ratings categories, instead the institutional ownership has no notable effects on corporate social responsibility classification, on the contrary of what the good management and risk-aversion theories assumed.