How CEO’s education impacts CSR performance – An empirical analysis of publicly listed companies

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of CEOs’ educational background on firms' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance in Germany.

This empirical quantitative paper covers a sample of companies listed on the German DAX and MDAX for the business years 2015-2019 (285 firm-year observations). We conduct various regression analyses to measure the link between CEO educational background and ESG performance in Germany, using data from the Thomson Reuters Eikon database. Moreover, additional analyses have been conducted to further examine the impact of CEOs’ educational background on the disaggregated Environmental, Social, and Governance Pillar Scores.

CEOs with an educational background in business or economics, engineering, and natural science have no significant impact on ESG performance. The additional analyses indicated that an educational background in natural science is positively associated with the Governance Pillar Score.

To the best of our knowledge, this analysis is the first empirical study that focuses exclusively on a German setting. The results show that education has no significant effect on ESG performance, suggesting that the educational background of CEOs has little to no impact on the strategic decisions towards firms more pronounced CSR engagement.