Does Board Structure Matter in CSR Spending of Commercial Banks? Empirical Evidence from an Emerging Economy

Bishnu Kumar Adhikary and Ranjan Kumar Mitra

A chapter in Corporate Social Responsibility in the 21st Century from IntechOpen

Abstract: This chapter examines the impact of board elements on CSR spending by private commercial banks in an emerging economy, considering Bangladesh as a case. In doing so, we collected necessary data from the annual reports of 30 commercial banks listed on the Dhaka Stock Exchange, covering the period 2007-2020. In addition, we reviewed the patterns of CSR spending by commercial banks to understand the CSR universe in Bangladesh. We adopted the OLS model with two-way clustering to measure the effects of board elements on CSR spending. Our results confirm that factors, such as independent directors and board size, have a significant and positive relationship with CSR expenditures, while board gender deters the same. Also, board meetings do not have any significant connection with CSR spending. For control variables, factors, such as firm size and leverage, tend to promote the CSR spending of commercial banks, while profitability has no such relationship. As for the sectoral distribution of CSR funds, we found that although the absolute amount of CSR expenditures by banks has increased substantially over the years, they are primarily limited to health, education, natural disasters, and humanitarian activities. These findings are expected to have significant policy implications.

Keywords: CSR expenditures; board structure; corporate social responsibility (CSR); commercial banks; Bangladesh (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/82405 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ito:pchaps:269141

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.105589

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from IntechOpen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Slobodan Momcilovic ().