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INTRODUCTION
Corporate social responsibility (CSR), defined as ‘actions that appear to further some social good, beyond the interests of the firm and that which is required by law’ (McWilliams & Siegel, 2001: 117), is gaining increasing attention from the public. Consequently, many corporations are now engaged in increasingly prosocial behaviors. The literature has examined CSR with reference to two main themes: specific CSR activities, such as donations (Brammer & Millington, 2008), environmental protection (Flammer, 2013), and fair treatment of and care for employees (Flammer & Luo, 2017); and CSR performance as rated by a third party (e.g., Kinder, Lydenberg, & Domini's rating; see Chin, Hambrick, & Treviño, 2013; Koh, Qian, & Wang, 2014; Petrenko, Aime, Ridge, & Hill, 2016). However, the important topic of CSR disclosure, including firms’ public reporting of their economic, environmental, social, and governance performance, remains underexplored (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012).[1] Although CSR disclosure reflects corporate accountability in supplying information to stakeholders and is strategically important, it is ‘fraught with uncertainty’ (Lewis, Walls, & Dowell, 2014: 713) and incurs significant liabilities (Lyon & Maxwell, 2011). Therefore, knowledge of the kinds of firm that may decide to disclose their CSR activities is still limited.
Our understanding of CSR disclosure is further limited by a disproportionate focus on mandatory CSR disclosure in the literature. Indeed, relying on institutional theory (Luo, Wang, & Zhang, 2017; Marquis & Qian, 2014) or stakeholder theory (Donaldson, 1999; Thijssens, Bollen, & Hassink, 2015), researchers have tended to view CSR disclosure as a response to external pressure from governments, activists, and other important stakeholders (Reid & Toffel, 2009; van Aaken, Splitter, & Seidl, 2013). From this viewpoint, managers have a limited effect on CSR disclosure, which is determined mainly by external forces. However, CSR disclosure can be largely voluntary and therefore subject to managerial discretion. Upper echelons theory (Hambrick & Mason, 1984) suggests that a firm's CSR disclosure is the manifestation of managerial preferences (Hemingway & Maclagan, 2004) and depends on the freedom executives have to make their own decisions (Clarkson, Li, Richardson, & Vasvari, 2008; Hambrick, 2007). In line with this view, researchers have found growing evidence that the attributes of chief executive officers (CEOs), such as personal values (Agle, Mitchell, & Sonnenfeld, 1999), political...