Overselling corporate social responsibility
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We show that firms hype up their corporate social responsibility (CSR) narratives during the turn‐of‐the‐year earnings conference calls to project an overly responsible public image of their firms. This previously unexplored phenomenon does not appear to be related to past, current, and future CSR engagements and cannot be explained by observed time‐varying firm attributes and unobserved time‐invariant firm and CEO attributes. We find that the fourth‐quarter CSR narrative hike is more pronounced among firms that are (ex ante) expected to do more corporate good as well as firms embedded in dirty industries, but less prevalent among firms facing elevated product‐market threats. Although elevated CSR narrative is associated with positive short‐term market reaction and lower near‐term stock price crash risk, such behavior tends to reduce financial report readability and leads to lower equity valuation in the longer term. Our analyses suggest that CSR narrative hike at the turn‐of‐the‐year is a pervasive phenomenon in the corporate landscape and may have valuation and governance implications.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it