SAMUEL KIM

I am a post-doctoral researcher in management and sustainability at UCLA. I received my PhD in Strategy at Washington University in St. Louis.

I study how organizations engage in stakeholder management by strategically disclosing and communicating information to manage their organizational impression among key stakeholders, with a particular focus on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues.

My dissertation examines how stakeholders evaluate organizations’ ESG commitments when they observe what firms say, what they do, and whether the two are consistent. Specifically, I investigate how different pieces of information—such as a firm's stated motives for a social initiative, the visible diversity of its leadership, and the verifiable alignment between its past rhetoric and present reality on employee composition—shape the decisions of prospective employees, donors, and investors.

Empirically, I draw on quasi-natural experiments using large-scale archival data and LLM-based text analysis, as well as online choice-based conjoint experiments to measure how stakeholders respond to corporate social strategies.

You can find my CV here and contact me at kimsamuel@wustl.edu.