دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی مسئولیت اجتماعی شرکتی و کارآیی سرمایه گذاری - اشپرینگر 2018

Abstract

Using a sample of 21,030 US firm-year observations that represents more than 3000 individual firms over the 1998–2012 period, we investigate the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and investment efficiency. We provide strong and robust evidence that high CSR involvement decreases investment inefficiency and consequently increases investment efficiency. This result is consistent with our expectations that high CSR firms enjoy low information asymmetry and high stakeholder solidarity (stakeholder theory). Moreover, our findings suggest that CSR components that are directly related to firms’ primary stakeholders (e.g. employee relations, product characteristics, environment, and diversity) are more relevant in reducing investment inefficiency compared with those related to secondary stakeholders (e.g. human rights and community involvement). Finally, additional results show that the effect of CSR on investment efficiency is more pronounced during the subprime crisis. Taken together, our results highlight the important role that CSR plays in shaping firms’ investment behaviour and efficiency.

Conclusion

In this study, we provide one of the first attempts to investigate the relationship between CSR and investment efficiency. Using a large sample of more than 3000 individual firms representing 21,030 firm-year observations over the 1998–2012 period, we find statistically significant evidence that CSR is positively related to investment efficiency. We believe that our evidence is mainly due to the low level of information asymmetry that high CSR firms enjoy, as well as their good management practices. Our findings are robust when using alternative measures of CSR, alternative measures of investment efficiency, alternative estimations and standard errors, and several approaches to address endogeneity and self-selection bias. Moreover, among the individual components of CSR, we show that dimensions which are linked to primary stakeholders (e.g. employee relations, product characteristics, environment, and diversity) are the dimensions that play the most important role in improving investment efficiency. Additional results suggest that CSR had an additional effect on investment efficiency during the subprime crisis. High CSR firms benefit from employee solidarity and customer loyalty in financial crises, which enhance the efficiency of their investment. In a final set of tests, our findings indicate that extremely low CSR and extremely high CSR firms do not enjoy a high level of investment efficiency. Our study’s results support the theory that CSR investments may be considered as an effective way to improve investment efficiency. Corporate managers are highly encouraged to improve their practices with their primary stakeholders. Such improvements will likely result in reflecting a better image of the company, gaining employee loyalty, and enhancing customer support. This may result in an increase in investment efficiency, especially in times of financial stability, which in turn leads to high financial performance.