Are R&D-Intensive firms also corporate social responsibility specialists? A multicountry study

•Firms with higher R&D intensity tend to be corporate social responsibility (CSR) specialists.•High-discretion slack resources allow R&D-intensive firms to be more balanced in their CSR.•The R&D intensity–CSR specialization relationship varies across industry characteristics.•A natural experiment indicates that R&D intensity influences CSR specialization, rather than vice versa. Seeking to obtain efficiency in the development and integration of knowledge about R&D and corporate social responsibility (CSR), firms face hard choices about their resource allocation to these two areas because of the specialized nature of knowledge and related barriers to integration. We address this organizational resource allocation dilemma by relaxing the common assumption that firms are either responsible or irresponsible and examining financial slack as a possible moderator. Using a multicountry sample of 1,957 firms over a 16-year timespan, we find strong empirical support for the positive association between firms' R&D intensity and CSR specialization, a novel concept that—distinct from CSR as such—gauges the extent to which firms specialize in specific environmental, social, or governance aspects of CSR. However, there is insufficient support for financial slack as a moderator in general (except for one noteworthy industry pattern and an alternative operationalization of slack). The exceptions suggest that the nature of organizational slack may influence the relationship between R&D and CSR specialization.