Bereskin, Campbell, and Kedia (2014)

Bereskin, Fred, Terry Campbell, and Simi Kedia.  “Philanthropy, Corporate Culture and Misconduct.”  Working paper (University of Delaware), May 7, 2014.

From the authors' abstract:  "[W]e find that employees at philanthropic firms are significantly more likely to whistle blow upon discovery of misconduct. Moreover, directors at giving firms are more likely to fire a CEO after misconduct is revealed. Finally, our paper finds that the decision to engage in philanthropic activities and the amount of giving are negatively associated with subsequent corporate misconduct. The results persist after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, are robust to differing approaches for defining misconduct and culture, and are robust to our controls for potential endogeneity."

Link:  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2370482