Conference Agenda

While corporate civil liability for damages is not a novel concept in national law, it is not yet clear how it relates to the corporate human rights due diligence duty in the recent EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). To contribute to filling this gap, this article discusses the human rights due diligence duty under the scope of civil law duties in continental and common law jurisdictions. Consequently, it examines the impact of the EU human rights due diligence duty on the parent-subsidiary corporation relationship and the responsibility of the former for the torts of the latter. Arguing for a stricter liability regime between the parent and the subsidiary, the article concludes by discussing the effects of the EU Directive on the company law concept of separate personality.

This study investigates whether part-time employees improve firm-level ESG (i.e., environmental, social, and governance) performance. Combining complementary views from role and issue-selling theory, we theorize that the temporal structure of part-time arrangements may be driven by a part-time employee’s prosocial motives, which include a greater emphasis on non-work responsibilities (e.g., caregiving and responsibility for others). Moreover, this identity linked to prosociality might induce a corresponding issue-selling behavior at the workplace since part-time employees might push for more responsible conduct from their employer. We develop and test this theoretical prediction using a three-studies design. Study 1 finds that part-time employees are more prosocially inclined than their peers, as evidenced by higher social value orientation scale values. Study 2 applies BERT topic modeling to a large sample of Glassdoor employee reviews and reveals that part-time employees address ESG issues more frequently in their reviews than their full-time counterparts. Study 3 provides macro-level evidence that firms with more part-time employees exhibit better ESG performance. We mitigate endogeneity concerns using the coefficient stability test by Oster (2019), the staggered adoption of the Affordable Care Act, and occupation-specific effects of part time employees.

A growing literature considers the role of workers’ personal politics in driving organizational outcomes. Prior work has measured the distribution of workers’ personal politics within employers using political donations. In this paper, we introduce an alternative measure, VRscores, which we construct by linking US voter registrations with online worker profiles. We show that VRscores capture a significantly larger and more representative population of employees and employers. VRscores and donations-based measures are only moderately correlated and differ in their classification of the political lean of a given workplaces for nearly one in four public companies. We describe various applications of VRscores for strategy and management scholars as well as social scientists more broadly.