Entrepreneurial Firms’ CSR: A Behavioral Perspective on the Role of CEO Birth Order

Despite psychology literature indicates CEO birth order as a key predictor of individual behavior, this individual characteristic has been largely neglected in management research. In this paper, we investigate the relation between CEO birth order and entrepreneurial firm’s CSR behavior. In so doing, we draw on behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology, and we identify economic and social preferences as two possible channels through which birth order effects propagate to the firms’ CSR behavior. Depending on the relative strength of these channels, we develop competing hypotheses. Analyses of an unbalanced panel dataset of 424 firm-year observations of family firms reveal a negative relation between CEO birth order and CSR behavior, implying the dominance of the economic channel. This relation is positively and negatively moderated by CEO sibship size and age, respectively.