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The paper aims to estimate how corporate philanthropy expenditures and corporate philanthropy disclosure (in general and in different spheres) affect investment attractiveness of Russian companies.

To assess the degree of corporate philanthropy disclosure the authors compiled lexicons based on a set of techniques: text and frequency analysis, correlations, principal component analysis. To adjust the existing classifications of corporate philanthropic activities to the Russian market the authors employed expert analysis. The empirical research base includes 83 Russian publicly traded companies for the period 2013–2019. To estimate the impact of indicators of corporate philanthropy disclosure on company's investment attractiveness the authors utilized panel data regression and random forest algorithm.

We compiled 2 Russian lexicons: one on general issues of corporate philanthropy and another one on philanthropic activities in various spheres (sports and healthcare; support for certain groups of people; social infrastructure; children protection and youth policy; culture, education and science). 2. The paper observes that the disclosure of non-financial data including that related to general issues of corporate philanthropy as well as to different spheres affects the market capitalization of the largest Russian companies. The results of regression analysis suggest that disclosure of altruism-driven philanthropic activities (such as corporate philanthropy in the sphere of culture, education and science) has a lesser impact on company's investment attractiveness than that of activities driven by business-related motives (sports and healthcare, children protection and youth policy).

Our findings are important to management, investors, financial analysts, regulators and various agencies providing guidance on corporate governance and sustainability reporting. However, the authors acknowledge that the research results may lack generalizability due to the sample covering a single national context. Researchers are encouraged to test the proposed approach further on other countries' data by using the authors’ compiled lexicons.

The study aims to expand the domains of signaling and agency theories. First, this subject has not been widely examined in terms of emerging markets, the authors’ study is the first to focus on the Russian market. Secondly, the majority of scholars use text analysis to examine not only the impact of charitable donations but also the effect of corporate philanthropy disclosure. Thirdly, the authors provided the authors’ own lexicon of corporate philanthropy disclosure based on machine learning technique and expert analysis. Fourthly, to estimate the impact of corporate philanthropy on company's investment attractiveness the authors used the original approach based on combination of linear (regression), and non-linear methods (permutation importance. The authors’ findings extend the theoretical concept of Peterson et al. (2021): corporate philanthropy is viewed as the company strategy to reinforce its reputation, it helps to establish more efficient relationships with stakeholders which, in its turn, results in the increased business value.

Inspired by the comparison of charity donations among candidates in rural elections, the authors linked the non-profit motives of charity to corporate pollution emissions. And on this basis, the authors aim to provide theoretical and empirical explanations for the relationship between corporate philanthropy and pollution. The authors find that the desire to pursue more pollution emissions stimulates the firm's philanthropy, which is similar to the public welfare donations in rural elections.

Firstly, the authors construct a game-theoretical framework consisting of an entrepreneur and a bureaucrat to study the environmental cost of corporate philanthropy through the impact on pollution emission by the firm. Secondly, the authors used various empirical methods, including hybrid OLS, IV-2SLS, PSM, etc., to empirically test the impact of a firm's philanthropy on corporate pollution emissions. Finally, the authors use the output and abatement input as intermediary variables and apply the intermediary effect model to test the impact mechanism between corporate philanthropy and corporate pollution emissions.

Theoretical model finds that the firm invests more in philanthropy discharges more emissions when the theoretical model is in political equilibrium. Besides, empirical results show that corporate philanthropy will lead to more pollution emissions by reducing abatement input and increasing production. Finally, the heterogeneity test finds that compared with state-owned enterprises, the intention of non-state-owned enterprises' philanthropy for more pollution emission is more obvious. Moreover, the improvement of regional environmental regulation can significantly inhibit the realization of corporate philanthropy's poor motive.

The results have obvious policy implications for China's future policy-making. Firstly, regulatory agencies should pay close attention to the charitable behaviors of firms with serious negative environmental externalities, and prevent them from replacing more pollution emissions with philanthropy. Besides, due to weak environmental supervision in rural areas, rural polluting enterprises will be more inclined to make charitable donations to the village collective to obtain more emission rights. Therefore, the government should strengthen environmental supervision in rural areas to prevent enterprises from wanton pollution.

By constructing a game-theoretical framework consisting of an entrepreneur and a bureaucrat, the authors expound on corporate philanthropy's pollution motivation and decision-making mechanism for the first time in theory. Besides, this paper finds that the desire to pursue more pollution emissions also stimulates the firm's philanthropy. This paper expands the literature on corporate charitable donation motivations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how affiliation with the government-controlled business association, namely, China Federation of Industry and Commerce (CFIC), affects corporate philanthropy in an emerging market.

Through an analysis of survey data gathered from Chinese private firms, this paper conducts multiple regressions to examine the impact of the CFIC membership on corporate philanthropy.

Empirical results show that the CFIC membership of private entrepreneurs is significantly positively associated with corporate philanthropy. Moreover, this study finds that the provincial marketization level and the firm Communist Party branch attenuate the positive association between CFIC membership and corporate philanthropy, indicating that the effect of CFIC on corporate philanthropy is more pronounced in regions with lower marketization level and firms without Communist Party branch. The findings are robust to various alternate measures of corporate philanthropy and remain valid after controlling for potential endogeneity.

Firms will be more active in corporate philanthropy to respond to the government’s governance appeal when they join the CFIC. This highlights the implications of political connections and in particular on the value of government-controlled business associations in the Chinese business world.

This study extends the literature on the determinants of corporate philanthropy and deepens the theoretical understanding of the governance role of business association with Chinese characteristics.

The concept of diaspora philanthropy contains the following two components: diasporas, who are individuals who live outside of their homelands but maintain a sense of identity with their home countries, and charitable giving provided by these diasporas to causes related to their hometowns. Often diaspora philanthropy happens through intermediary organizations such as hometown associations, internet-based philanthropic platforms and faith-based groups. Little research explores immigrant-owned small businesses as intermediary organizations for diaspora philanthropy. In the literature of social entrepreneurship, the theory of opportunity recognition provides insights on how do businesses identify opportunities for fulfilling social missions. However, it is uncertain whether this major theory can be applied to a specific context such as immigrant-owned small businesses. In this research, I aim to understand immigrant-owned small businesses' participation in social entrepreneurship through diaspora philanthropy, especially in responding to natural disasters. Specifically, three research questions were proposed: What role do small businesses play? What mechanisms do they use to partake in diaspora philanthropy? Moreover, what motivates them to participate?

This research uses an in-depth case study that focuses on a specific diaspora philanthropy behavior in responding to a natural disaster in the diaspora's hometown. The subject of this work is a small business owned by an immigrant in New York City, the US. To collect data on this case, the author utilized a mixed-methods design, which involves two types of qualitative data: document analysis and interview. Giving the purpose of this study, the author used thematic coding for both newspaper article data and interview data following a deductive approach.

The result shows that small businesses have an inherent advantage in building close interpersonal relationships with their customers and serve as the connector between their customers and larger philanthropic organizations. Because of their limitations on resources, small businesses collaborate with larger nonprofit organizations to do complicated philanthropic work for improved capacity. When diaspora philanthropy happens due to natural disasters in homelands, diasporas experience some level of guilt since they are not there with the people of their homeland in solidarity facing the difficulties. This guilt, which is related to cultural influences, is one of the motivations that make diasporas give to their homelands. The findings also show that the opportunity recognition theory fits well into explaining the altruistic behaviors of small businesses owned by immigrants.

A lot remains unknown about immigrant-owned small businesses, including their altruistic behaviors and participation in social entrepreneurship. This research expands the current knowledge on diaspora philanthropy by identifying the roles of small businesses, the mechanisms used by small businesses and the motivations of giving during natural disasters. This research also validates the opportunity recognition theory of social entrepreneurship in a specific context.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the current research on corporate philanthropy and organizational outcomes by empirically exploring two specific types of antecedents: board of director composition and industry membership.

A theoretical framework was developed based on the resource dependence and stakeholder theories which suggest that the extent that firms build relationship with certain stakeholders is closely tied to the personal and social background of board members, in turn influencing the allocation of resources to corporate philanthropy. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis as well as analysis of variance with post hoc comparisons was conducted using multi-year data philanthropic data from 104 US corporations.

The results provided empirical support for a positive relationship between the number of female board directors and the level of corporate philanthropy. In addition, the results showed significant inter-industry variations in the level of corporate philanthropy. This indicated that the rather aggressive role of philanthropy in mitigating reputational challenges associated with product-market dysfunctions. Contrary to the theoretical predictions, the results did not support a positive relationship between the proportion of outside directors and level of philanthropy.

The authors believe the empirical finding on the relationship between industry membership and corporate philanthropy is a significant contribution to the philanthropy literature. Accordingly, by empirically showing the disproportionately higher level of philanthropy by some prominent industries (such as gas and oil, financial services and chemical) than their counterparts, the authors contribute to the understanding of sector-level determinants of corporate philanthropy.

Since board of directors have a direct involvement in reviewing and approving major corporate initiatives, the choice of these directors is more likely to influence the amount of resources committed to philanthropic causes. Consistent with other studies in the larger corporate social responsibility research, the authors found that more women directors on the board are associated with greater philanthropic spending. Hence, a major implication of the study is that shareholders and the general corporate community need to pay close attention into who is elected to serve as director of business organizations as these directors’ background and experience could shape major social responsibility initiatives such as corporate philanthropy.

By empirically investigating the relationship between board composition and philanthropy, this study extends the scholarly discussion to focus on the role of the board in shaping the level of firm commitment in overall CSR. In addition, this study provides empirical evidence on the role of industry context in the level of commitment in corporate philanthropic activities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors affecting the relationship between annual changes in the amount of corporate foundation giving and changes in corporate reputation. The factors investigated included the existing corporate reputation and the economic conditions.

Published data were obtained for 77 US corporations during both an upward and downward economic trend. Data for corporate foundation giving were obtained from IRS tax records while data on corporate reputation were obtained from the Reputation Institute’s RepTrak scores.

Linear mixed model analyses demonstrated that a firm’s prior reputation moderates the relationship between corporate philanthropy and changes in corporate reputation during a downward trend. That is, changes in corporate charitable giving and corporate reputation covaried positively for firms with an existing favorable reputation. However, for firms with an unfavorable reputation, there was an inverse relationship between changes in corporate giving and corporate reputation. The interaction between the variables was prevalent only during an economic downturn.

The findings provide firms with relevant information on conditions that affect how changes in charitable giving are likely to impact corporate reputation.

This study is the first to look at the effects of annual changes in corporate charitable giving on corporate reputation and adds to the research literature by demonstrating the complexity of the relationship by identifying two key factors that should be taken into considerations when developing annual budgets for charitable giving.

The aim of this paper is to examine how companies officially recognized in Russia as corporate philanthropy leaders actually introduce, implement, and evaluate philanthropic activities. Focusing on the connections between these activities and corporate strategy, the paper seeks to investigate the main trends in corporate philanthropy development over the period 2007‐2010, assuming that corporate philanthropy is an integral part of corporate social performance.

A theoretical framework is based on the recognition of “strategic” philanthropy as a part as well as the main trend in current philanthropic activities of leading companies. The analysis as such is settled on survey data collected from participants in the national “Corporate Philanthropy Leaders” award competition conducted by the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti, PwC, and the non‐profit grant‐making organization “Donors Forum” from 2008 to 2011.

The results testify to strengthening connections between corporate philanthropy and corporate strategy, enhancing the strategic nature of philanthropy as such. Here the responding companies significantly diversified the directions of their philanthropic activities, whereas the distribution of corporate philanthropy by form showed a high stability that was practically unaffected by the economic crisis of 2008‐2009. A common practice is the professionalization of managing corporate philanthropy, with a growing role for CSR departments.

The study focuses on the activities of leading Russian companies participating in the national “Corporate Philanthropy Leaders” award competition, thereby restricting the analysis of non‐participants. Moreover, the evolution of competition surveys and their methodology as well as relatively low repetition of participants also restrict the degree of generalization. Future research could be based on the findings of this study to create hypotheses to be tested on a broader sample of Russian companies.

The majority of studies of corporate philanthropy in Russia are still covering the necessity of corporate philanthropy for resolving societal problems and describing particular “best practice” cases rather than analyzing the relation of corporate philanthropy to the whole system of CSP and its strategic applications. This study aims to address this gap by focusing on corporate philanthropy leaders as a first step to broad nationwide research.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the nonlinear effects of corporate philanthropy on the responses of both internal and external stakeholders as well as its impact on corporate financial performance.

Based on the stakeholder theory, the authors developed a conceptual model to examine the nonlinear effects of corporate philanthropy on company performance. For the empirical analysis, data from 397 company-years was analyzed using a using a Heckman two-stage model. The robustness of the findings was also confirmed through panel regression analysis.

The study revealed a linear relationship between corporate reputation and corporate philanthropy, whereas job satisfaction exhibited a nonlinear relationship with corporate philanthropy.

This research bridges the gap in extant literature by scrutinizing the nonlinear associations between corporate philanthropy and financial performance. Additionally, it addresses an emerging scholarly demand to uncover the “dark side” of corporate philanthropy through an investigation into its adverse impacts on employee satisfaction. Moreover, the study augments existing understandings of stakeholder theory and corporate philanthropy, positing that the influence of corporate philanthropy, as conceptualized through stakeholder theory, hinges on perceived fairness in multilateral relationships.

This study aims to investigate the perspective of corporate philanthropy during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China for firms with various levels of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Specifically, the study appraises the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the stock returns and sustainable development of Chinese-listed companies and determines the likelihood of paying donations vis-à-vis firm reputation.

The study used data from 117 Chinese-listed firms engaged in philanthropy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors also utilized the stock returns and cash donation data, and owing to the cross-sectional data and continuous nature of dependent variables, they employed the ordinary least squares regression to test the research hypotheses.

The results show that irresponsible actions have a positive relationship with donations. The study particularly reveals that irresponsible firms have significant negative abnormal returns during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study to explore the perspective of corporate philanthropy during the COVID-19 pandemic for companies with different CSR levels. This study contributes to the empirical research on CSR and provides insights for managerial-cum-financial decisions to encourage managers of irresponsible firms to pursue philanthropic behaviors after crisis events.

The purpose of this study is to empirically explore the interaction between corporate philanthropy and firm performance through the mechanism of corporate strategies, such as unrelated diversification and global strategic posture (GSP).

A theoretical framework was developed based on institutional theory to argue that GSP can play an important mediating role in the relationship between corporate philanthropy and firm performance. PROCESS macro for SPSS and SAS to test a mediation was conducted using data from 115 publicly traded US firms between 2010 and 2017.

This study verified that GSP acts as an indirect mediator that influences the relationship between corporate philanthropy and firm performance. However, unrelated diversification was not found to be a mediator of that relationship.

This study has extended the current understanding of institutional theory to explain the relationship between corporate philanthropy and corporate strategies.

This study helps to provide corporate managers with a promising notion that corporate philanthropy can help firms with market entry strategies.

This study helps to provide empirical evidence on the relationships among corporate philanthropy, corporate strategies and firm performance. Specifically, the finding of this study indicates strategic conditions under which the firm’s philanthropic efforts are more likely to influence firm performance.