We examine the relation between the CEO’s childhood socioeconomic class and corporate labor policies. We find that CEOs raised in low socioeconomic class families are less likely to invest in employee friendly firm policies measured by several types of labor and employment litigation, including litigation by unions, and occupational safety measures. These results are confirmed by crowdsourced employee firm reviews across several workplace dimensions. Our findings are supported by the studies of within-family transmission of occupational knowledge and formation of occupational norms as well as development of empathy and altruistic behaviors in children.

This study explores the relationship between board chairs' early-life experience in the Great Chinese Famine and the debt maturity choices made by Chinese listed firms between 2000 and 2017. Our findings indicate that board chairs with famine experience exhibit a propensity towards long-term debt usage. We argue that this finding can be attributed to a risk-averse rather than altruistic orientation among board chairs who have experienced famine. Our results are particularly salient for firms with lower asset redeployability, higher distress risk, no political affiliations, and those that are not stateowned enterprises. Furthermore, this study provides three analyses to support the risk aversion traits: (1) board chairs with disaster experience underestimate their company's profit potential, (2) board chairs located in areas with higher mortality rates exhibit more obvious risk aversion behavior, and (3) extending the debt maturity date, board chairs can effectively increase company investment and mitigate the underinvestment problem.

Using hand-collected data on siblings of chairpersons in Chinese family firms, we examine the impact of the chairperson having siblings on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of their firm. The findings suggest that when a firm has a siblings-chairperson, the firm has a better CSR rating than firms with a chairperson without siblings. Specifically, a firm with a siblings- chairperson, on average, has a CSR rating approximately 7.96% higher than a median firm’s rating. The conclusions are robust to a battery of robustness checks including a regression discontinuity research design, alternative measures of CSR, a propensity score matching sample, placebo tests, and different estimation methods. Additional analysis suggests that the mechanisms behind siblings and CSR are consistent with both competition and altruistic effects among siblings. Further analysis suggests that the positive impact of a siblings-chairperson on the CSR rating of firms is more salient when the local familism culture is stronger, when government official career advancement incentives are lower, or when the siblings are directors or CEOs of other firms. Finally, firms with a siblings-chairperson are also pro-shareholder because they consume less perquisites than firms without a siblings-chairperson. Collectively, the findings are consistent with the notion that, by having at least one sibling, a chairperson is more competitive and altruistic than a chairperson without siblings, and such behavior enhances CSR. Family structure matters in corporate practices.