Descripción:
We study the life cycle stage at which firms decide to join the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). The UNGC is arguably the most important voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative. We follow the life cycle methodology by Dickinson (2011). Our overall results show that most firms in the sample decide to join the UNGC when at the Mature stage of their life cycle. This result is in line with previous studies that show that mature firms invest more in CSR, than firms in other life stages. To the best of our knowledge, this exploratory undertaking is not yet available in the corporate responsibility literature.