关键词: 持续性慈善捐赠, 董事长早期贫困经历, 亲社会烙印, 人生经历, 归因理论

Abstract: The corporate sustained charitable donation plays an increasingly important role in China’s progress toward common prosperity, yet the specific factors that shape such sustained donation remain insufficiently understood. Based on the upper echelons theory and imprinting theory, this paper uses a sample of Chinese listed companies from 2006 to 2021 and employs a fixed-effects model to examine the impact of chairpersons’ early-life poverty experience on corporate sustained charitable donations. Incorporating the attribution theory, it further investigates the moderating effect of the chairpersons’ elite education experience and diversified career experience in this relationship. The results show that chairpersons’ early-life poverty experiences have a significant positive impact on corporate sustained charitable donation. However, both elite education experience and diversified career experiences weaken the positive impact of early poverty experiences. The findings suggest that early-life poverty experience has a “prosocial imprinting” effect on chairpersons, but this effect may gradually fade due to the self-interest tendencies embedded in elite education and diversified career paths. Further analysis shows that the chairpersons’ early-life poverty experiences promote sustained charitable donation by increasing corporate altruistic orientation, thereby confirming the transmission mechanism of “early-life poverty experience→corporate altruism→corporate sustained charitable donation”. These findings broaden the research perspectives on managerial experience and corporate social responsibility, extend the application of attribution theory in the corporate social responsibility domain, and provide managerial insights and policy implications for encouraging enterprises to actively engage in sustained charitable donation and promoting common prosperity for all people.

Key words: sustained charitable donation, chairpersons’ early-life poverty experience, prosocial imprinting, life experience, attribution theory