Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) involvement and disclosure has been becoming increasingly popular among US public firms, including those that qualify as real estate investment trusts (REITs). This paper aims to discover the relationship between CSR involvement and potential determinants such as growth opportunities, profitability, visibility, and agency costs. Types of CSR involvement are assessed in terms of environmental, community, and governance disclosures and are quantified using word count from the company’s voluntary disclosure. Our results support the hypothesis that CSR has a strategic element and that REITs have greater CSR involvement when they have greater growth and investment opportunities. When the type of disclosure is broken into subcategories, the results show that not all dimensions of CSR are alike: environmental, community, and governance CSR disclosures appear to be motivated by different sets of incentives and reasons.

Introduction

Over the past few decades, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an essential part of business operations and garnered intense interest, debate, and controversy across almost the entire range of business disciplines. For instance, Gregory et al. (2014), Harjoto and Jo (2015), Mishra and Modi (2013) and many others find that CSR activities have implications on corporate valuation, financial performance, and risk profile. Chan et al. (2014), Jo and Harjoto (2011), and Mason and Simmons (2014) investigate the relationship between CSR and corporate governance through a variety of viewpoints, including interest alignment and managerial activism. Cormier et al. (2004), Di Giuli and Kostovetsky (2014), and Perrow (1970) study CSR as a legitimacy response to environmental concerns and political pressure. As a concept, CSR is integral to ethics and moral values; it entails a firm’s initiatives that contribute to social welfare (Barnett 2007). Carroll’s (1979) seminal conceptualization of CSR explicitly contains an ethical dimension in which CSR activities have moral values that are expected of firms by their stakeholders.