Immigrant CEOs and the geography of CSI (Bu et al., 2025) | SMJ FT50

Welcome to Revise and Resubmit!Today, we’re diving into a fascinating study that touches on a question most of us have never even considered: Can where a CEO is from shape where a company behaves irresponsibly? Think about it. A multinational firm operates across the world, but does its corporate misbehavior—its social irresponsibility—follow a pattern? More importantly, can the CEO’s immigrant background influence where that misbehavior happens… or doesn’t happen?In this episode, we explore Not in my homeland: Immigrant CEOs and the geography of corporate social irresponsibility, published in the prestigious Strategic Management Journal, an FT50 journal—one of the top 50 business journals globally as ranked by the Financial Times. This study, authored by Juan Bu, Stephanie Lu Wang, Yejee Lee, and Dan Li, brings together place attachment theory and social capital theory to explain how immigrant CEOs tend to protect their homelands from corporate irresponsibility. But there’s a twist: They don’t just reduce bad behavior; they might also be able to shield it from the media’s eye.Using a difference-in-differences analysis on a sample of S&P 500 firms from 2007 to 2020, the researchers show that an immigrant CEO’s attachment to their home country can significantly impact where corporate irresponsibility happens—and how much the world gets to know about it. This effect gets even stronger when the CEO moved as an adult, when the company has a strong sustainability rating, and when press freedom in the homeland is weak.So, what does this mean for corporate governance? Should firms be more strategic in selecting immigrant CEOs? And is media freedom the ultimate check on corporate behavior?Let’s find out.A huge thanks to the authors—Juan Bu, Stephanie Lu Wang, Yejee Lee, and Dan Li—and to Strategic Management Society and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. for publishing this incredible research in Strategic Management Journal.If you found this discussion intriguing, make sure to subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify and check out our YouTube channel, Weekend Researcher. You can also find us on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcast.Now, here’s a question to leave you thinking: If a CEO’s personal background can shape corporate irresponsibility, what else about leadership might be influencing the world in ways we’ve never considered?ReferenceBu, J., Wang, S. L., Lee, Y., & Li, D. (2025). Not in my homeland: Immigrant CEOs and the geography of corporate social irresponsibility. Strategic Management Journal, 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3702Youtube Channel⁠https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher⁠Support us on Patreonhttps://patreon.com/weekendresearcher