Does Culture Matter for Corporate Philanthropic Giving?

This article explores cultural influence on corporate philanthropic giving, employing the case of merchant guilds culture in China and it further investigates the moderating effect of the types of corporate ownership. Our evidence suggests that merchant guilds culture can facilitate the extent and likelihood of corporate philanthropic giving, which is in accordance with the intuition that merchant guilds culture, which is rooted in Confucianism culture of China, has generally been associated with altruism. Consistent with our second prediction, we find that the relationship between merchant guilds culture and corporate philanthropic giving is more pronounced for privately owned firms than state-owned firms. These results are robust to several sensitivity checks, including using alternate variables to proxy for merchant guilds culture and corporate charitable giving, controlling for media coverage, and checking for potential endogeneity issues. This article provides a new perspective on the domestic culture through an empirical model that responds to a strong concern placed on merchant guilds culture and corporate philanthropic giving.