Economics Seminar Series with Sherry LI

Sherry Li is Lewis E. Epley, Jr., Professor of Economics and the Director of the Behavioral Business Research Lab at the Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas. Her research is primarily experimental and behavioral in broadly defined public economics, labor economics, and development economics. She will be presenting: 

I Work so I Choose: An Experiment on Worker Choice in Corporate Social Responsibility and Performance in a Developing Country

Abstract: 

 Economics research on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) offers inconclusive findings on its effects on worker performance. It predominantly focuses on developed countries, leaving developing countries unexplored. Our paper fills these gaps. We conduct an experiment with local workers in Colombia. By exogenously varying degrees of worker involvement in charity selection, we find that worker involvement boosts productivity while the employer’s pre-selected charity decreases worker productivity, supporting our theory. Our results also indicate that worker choice holds both instrumental (aligning charity mission with their preferences) and intrinsic values (the freedom to choose), shedding important light on CSR-policy-design in developing economies.