Conference Agenda

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to firm-level initiatives that improve environmental performance, social outcomes, or governance and now underpins a global asset market exceeding $30 trillion. I argue that an important, understudied driver of CSR’s rise is that sustainability has become a valued job attribute, turning CSR into a strategic tool for attracting and retaining talent. To quantify this mechanism, I develop a labor market model in which workers’ utility depends on firms’ CSR choices and estimate it using a matched employer–employee dataset covering all French firms combined with detailed CSR metrics. Importantly, my framework accounts for unobserved worker and firm heterogeneity in productivity, mitigating biases in simple wage comparisons. Two-way fixed effect estimates show that a standard deviation increase in a firm’s sustainability score is associated with a 2.5 to 8% reduction in hourly wages. The estimated relationship varies significantly over time and across firms, suggesting heterogeneous incentives to engage in CSR. This also implies that policies aimed at stimulating CSR investment can affect wage-setting and workforce composition, and should be designed taking firm labour-related motives into account.