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The COVID-19 pandemic is a serious crisis. To understand its effects, and to guide how firms should respond, we need evidence. However, since the crisis is recent, we do not yet have enough data to understand its long-term effects; since some firm responses have not yet been tried, or have only recently been implemented, we are unable to assess their success. Moreover, particularly given the seriousness of the pandemic, we need to ensure that evidence is of the highest quality, but the peer review process in finance journals takes several years.
We have collated a small selection of past papers that may be relevant for the current pandemic. While no two crises are the same, and the findings on prior downturns will not automatically apply to COVID-19, these papers will hopefully shed useful light on the current crisis. First, in nearly all cases they have been peer-reviewed; second, sufficient time elapsed after the downturns or policy responses to allow analyses of their long-term effects. A short summary of each paper and its potential relevance to the current crisis follows below.
Lins, Servaes and Tamayo (2017): “Social Capital, Trust, and Firm Performance: The Value of Corporate Social Responsibility during the Financial Crisis”
Journal of Finance
Practitioner-oriented version in the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance
Flammer and Ioannou (2018): To Save or to Invest? Strategic Management during the Financial Crisis
Kim, Maug, and Schneider (2018): Labor Representation in Governance as an Insurance Mechanism
Review of Finance
Edmans (2012): The Link Between Job Satisfaction and Firm Value, With Implications For Corporate Social Responsibility
Academy of Management Perspectives
Lins, Volpin, and Wagner (2013): Does Family Control Matter? International Evidence from the 2008–2009 Financial Crisis
Review of Financial Studies
What’s in Your Hand? How Businesses can Create Social Value (Alex Edmans)
- How all businesses - even small companies and those in unrelated industries - can play their part in the crisis
Q&A on Responsible Business in a Time of Crisis (Alex Edmans and Tom Gosling)
- Responses to audience Q&A from the webinar Responsible Business in a Time of Crisis, on the difficult trade-offs that companies face when implementing responsibility
Companies Need to Use Their Comparative Advantage to Serve Society (George Looker)
- Summary and video discussion (part one) between Alex Edmans and Elias Papaioannou about how businesses can become more responsible and better serve society
Firms Can ‘Grow Their pie’ During the Crisis by Redeploying Expertise and Innovating to Solve Emerging Challenges (George Looker)
- Summary and video discussion (part two) between Alex Edmans and Elias Papaioannou about how firms can increase value by taking responsible action that benefits all stakeholders