Board of Directors’ Confidence and Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract:

In the light of common practices of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) from listed companies in Indonesia and inclusion of many CSR aspect in annual report disclosure, little is known on factors that influence the decision on CSR activities and disclosures, especially regarding to Board of Directors’ characteristics. Specifically, this study aims to examine the effect of director’s confidence on CSR. We discussed two main motives of directors in conducting CSR, namely investment and hedging motives. This study use ASSET4’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) to measure CSR, which have not been widely used in CSR previous studies. Investment-based and media-based measurement are used to measure directors’ confidence. Total observations of this study are 185 firm-years for the period of 2012 to 2016. This study finds that higher Directors’ confidence increases CSR disclosure, which support the investment motive. This result is robust across several sensitivity tests.

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