Good corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings can increase a firm's legitimacy and reduce its default risk. Yet, the interpretation of CSR varies between different countries. We investigate whether CSR ratings have a risk‐mitigating effect across different institutional contexts. We find that good CSR ratings have a general risk‐mitigating effect. Yet, we also find that the effect decreases when the rating agency is embedded in the institutional context of its home country and the rated firm operates in a country with a different culture or regulatory system. This suggests that a rating agency's country of origin and its embeddedness in that country's context play an important role in the relationship between CSR ratings and default risk.