Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/327055 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Citation: 
[Journal:] BRQ Business Research Quarterly [ISSN:] 2340-9444 [Volume:] 28 [Issue:] 1 [Year:] 2025 [Pages:] 15-36
Publisher: 
Sage Publishing, London
Abstract: 
Despite the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) firm controversies, little is known about their effect on institutional investors. We study the most important institutional investors worldwide: pension funds and mutual funds. The separation between fund management and ownership raises the need to examine how fund managers and fund participants react to investee-firms' CSR controversies. Considering the conventional/Socially Responsible Investment (SRI-fund nature, we find that investee-firms' controversies diversely affect fund performance, depending on the controversy type. Furthermore, participants and managers of SRI pension and SRI mutual funds display a passive behavior toward controversies. These attitudes are consistent with enduring behavior and continuity investment policies, such as amending/controlling CSR-firm controversies. In contrast, conventional pension-fund and conventional mutual-fund participants seem guided by traditional investment rules to deal with unsatisfactory situations and respond to controversies after managerial decisions regarding these events with negative reactions. Finally, firms developing CSR-engagement strategies may soften market and managerial reactions toward controversies. Nonetheless, symbolic CSR-engagement practices arouse participants' responses.
Subjects: 
CSR controversy
institutional participant
investee firm
mutual fund
pension fund
JEL: 
G11
G23
M14
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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