This study investigates the influence of a CEO's career horizon on a firm's engagement in ESG. Given the private benefits which CEOs can extract from this strategy, we argue that a firm's willingness to pursue additional ESG efforts is likely to mirror CEOs' desire to strengthen their personal reputation and curb their perceived risk exposure at each stage of their career horizon. Drawing on the prospect theory, we theorize the decomposition of CEOs' career horizon into two counteracting forces (career concerns and legacy concerns) to explain how a CEO's effort in ESG could change depending on the length of the horizon and the influence of a reference point, such as their firm's performance relative to the industry benchmark. Using a sample of European listed companies from 2007 to 2018, our evidence supports an inverted U-shaped relationship between CEO career horizon and a firm's ESG engagement. This result shows the importance of a CEO's eagerness for personal reputation as a key antecedent of companies' ESG actions. However, a CEO's perceived risk exposure proves not to be a relevant driver of ESG, since we find that such a relationship is not sensitive to decision framing based on relative performance.

中文翻译：

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从黎明到黄昏：CEO职业生涯与ESG参与度之间的关系

本研究调查了首席执行官的职业生涯对公司参与 ESG 的影响。考虑到首席执行官可以从这一战略中获得的私人利益，我们认为，一家公司愿意采取额外的 ESG 努力，很可能反映了首席执行官在职业生涯每个阶段增强个人声誉并控制其感知风险的愿望。借鉴前景理论，我们将 CEO 的职业生涯视野分解为两种反作用力（职业担忧和遗产担忧），以解释 CEO 在 ESG 方面的努力如何根据视野长度和参考点的影响而变化，例如他们公司相对于行业基准的业绩。使用 2007 年至 2018 年欧洲上市公司的样本，我们的证据支持首席执行官职业生涯与公司 ESG 参与度之间存在倒 U 形关系。这一结果表明，首席执行官对个人声誉的渴望是公司 ESG 行动的关键先决条件。然而，事实证明，首席执行官的感知风险敞口并不是 ESG 的相关驱动因素，因为我们发现这种关系对基于相对绩效的决策框架并不敏感。