Your Behaviour Reflects Your Risk Attitude: The Influence of CEOs’ Insurance Behaviours on Corporate Social Responsibility

This study explores how CEOs’ insurance behaviours outside the workplace, as measured by the premium rates of their self-purchasing critical illness insurance, are related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. We show that such behaviours (i.e. the CEO-insurance effect) capture the variation in CEOs’ risk aversion and are positively associated with CSR performance. We also find that our results align with the risk mitigation hypothesis rather than the agency conflict hypothesis. Additional analysis reveals that the main effect is more pronounced among firms in uncertain environments. Further evidence shows that accounting conservatism and internal control are potential channels through which the CEO-insurance effect boosts CSR performance. Collectively, our evidence contributes to research on managerial risk attitude, heterogeneity in CSR policies and ‘off-the-job’ determinants of CEOs’ styles.