Journal of International Business and Economics

Impacts of Top Management Team Characteristics on Corporate Charitable Activity: Evidence from Chinese Listed Companies
Xin Huang, Koichi Nakagawa, Jie Li

Abstract
This research combines the upper echelons theory and corporate social responsibility, and through employing data from China, an emerging economy, it confirms the existence of the relationship between top management team characteristics and corporate charitable activity. These findings include that the top management teams which are characterized by more functional background in output functions and more educational specialty in science and engineering are less interested in corporate philanthropy; on the other hand, top management teams with higher age heterogeneity actively engage in corporate charitable activity, while those with higher heterogeneity of educational specialty are less willing to donate to charity. Especially, unlike many of the studies on Western countries, the research findings related to Chinese companies demonstrate that some of the top management team heterogeneities negatively influence corporate activities. Besides, the top management team tenure, age, educational level, and these heterogeneities of educational level, functional background and tenure have little effect on corporate philanthropy.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/jibe.v7n2a6