The effect of women’s entrepreneurship on corporate social responsibility

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the causal (not correlational) effect of women’s entrepreneurship on corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in Latin America. Design/methodology/approach: This study builds on a hitherto unexploited sparse data set on Latin American B Corporations to identify the causal relationship of interest and on a (synthetic) instrumental variable method. Findings: The results confirm that women’s entrepreneurship has a positive causal effect on social responsibility. This study finds that an increase of 1% in the proportion of women entrepreneurs leads to an increase of 0.5 in the B Impact Assessment score, the CSR indicator. Originality/value: This study contributes to the literature by providing robust statistical evidence of a causal relationship between women entrepreneurs and social responsibility practices in the Latin American context. This research captures the multidimensional nature of social responsibility by using a comprehensive and vast metric of CSR obtained from the data of the B Impact Assessment tool. This study illustrates how machine learning methods can be used to address the lack of structure of the Latin American B Impact Assessment data.