EXPLORING ALTERNATIVE AVENUES TO INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE AND FIRM ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIAL GOVERNANCE PERFORMANCE AND THE MODERATING EFFECT OF FIRM SIZE

Many research studies have explored the impact of international experience on an organization's strategic decisions and overall performance. However, these studies tend only to examine the connection between a CEO's international experience, such as traveling abroad for work or study during their adult life, and their organization's Environmental, Social, and Governance Performance (ESGP). To expand on this, I examined other methods of gaining international experience, such as personal exposure from living overseas and indirect exposure from foreign-born parents and grandparents. Through the imprinting and upper-echelon theories, I identified CEOs born and raised overseas as "first-generation immigrant CEOs" and CEOs born and raised in the United States by at least one immigrant parent or grandparent as "second and third-generation immigrant CEOs." I then studied the relationship between first-generation immigrant CEOs, second and third-generation immigrant CEOs, and firm Environmental, Social, and Governance performance (ESGP) while also considering the moderating effect of firm size. To conduct this research, I obtained a list of companies from the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 index for FY 2022 (N=444) and data from CSRHub and COMPUSTAT. Although the findings did not support the direct and moderating relationships studied, they provide recommendations for improvement and future research directions.