The Representation of Managers, Shareholders and other Stakeholders inside the Boardroom: Does it Matter for CSR Commitment? *.

Summary Using multi-source extra-financial rating datasets (Vigéo and Asset4), this paper empirically investigates the relationships between CSR commitment (social, environment and societal) and board composition for French listed firms (SBF120) over the 2006-2011 period. This paper tests the two main hypotheses regarding CSR commitment from the corporate governance perspective: CEO's oppor-tunistic behavior and stakeholder conflict resolution, and compares both shareholder and stakeholder board perspectives. We show that CSR commitment, except environment one, is driven by good corporate governance practices from the shareholder perspective (high independence and low share of insiders). From the stakeholder perspective, social commitment is positively associated with stake-holders' representation inside the boardroom and societal one is positively related to supply-chain stakeholders' representation. These results support the stakeholder conflict resolution hypothesis (value-enhancing view). However, the results are mixed for environmental CSR dimension, suggesting that environmental commitment reduces conflicts with employees but exacerbates them with other stakeholders.