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Do CEOs with Sent-Down Movement Experience Foster Corporate Environmental Responsibility?

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Abstract

As environmental issues have become increasingly prominent around the world, corporate environmental responsibility has begun to attract more attention. As the decision-makers of firms, top executives play an important role in the environmentally ethical behavior of their corporations. Few studies, however, have explored the motivations behind corporations’ environmentally responsible behavior from the perspective of how CEOs’ early experiences shape their decisions. This paper explores the impact that CEOs who experienced the Send-down movement have on their companies’ environmentally responsible behavior and the boundary conditions of this impact from the perspective of the imprinting theory. Based on the data of listed Chinese companies from 2009 to 2020, we have found that CEOs who were themselves “Sent-down youth” have a positive impact on corporate environmental responsibility. For firms with a higher proportion of state ownership and CEOs with Chinese Communist Party membership, the relationship between experience with the Send-down movement and corporate environmental responsibility is strengthened, whereas a higher level of market competition weakens the relationship. This article enriches and deepens the research on the imprinting theory, and it also has certain practical implications for firms that hire top executives with unique types of early experiences to promote business ethics improvement.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. Source: http://finance.china.com.cn/news/special/2017lh/20170314/4135018.shtml Accessed on June 15, 2022.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the projects of NSFC (No.72091313, 71672194, 72102235) and the Hunan Natural Science Foundation (No.2021JJ10066, 2022JJ30190).

Funding

Major Research Plan, No.72091313, Dayuan Li,National Natural Science Foundation of China,71672194, Dayuan Li, Young Scientists Fund,72102235, Ding Wang, Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province, 2021JJ10066, Dayuan Li, 2022JJ30190, Lu Zhang

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  1. School of Business, North Campus Central South University, Room 114 Management Building, Changsha, 410006, China

    Dayuan Li, Jialin Jiang, Chen Huang & Ding Wang

  2. School of Business, Hunan First Normal University, Changsha, 410006, China

    Lu Zhang

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Li, D., Jiang, J., Zhang, L. et al. Do CEOs with Sent-Down Movement Experience Foster Corporate Environmental Responsibility?. J Bus Ethics 185, 147–168 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05300-0

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