مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد مسئولیت اجتماعی شرکتی و کارآیی سرمایه گذاری – اسپرینگر 2018

Introduction

Over the last 40 years, the growing debate on the financial implications of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been far from resolved. While some scholars argue that high CSR involvement is associated with higher firm performance and higher firm value (e.g. Jo and Harjoto 2011, 2012), lower financial risk (e.g. Bouslah et al. 2013), lower information asymmetry (e.g. Cho et al. 2013), easy access to finance (e.g. Cheng et al. 2014), and lower cost of equity (e.g. El Ghoul et al. 2011), others argue that CSR activities are a source of conflict between different stakeholders (e.g. Kru¨ger 2015), reduce a firm’s resources because of unnecessary costs (e.g. Vance 1975), and that they are more likely to create a competitive disadvantage compared with less socially responsible firms (e.g. Aupperle et al. 1985). There are two opposite points of view, often reflecting the financial implications associated with high CSR activities. On the one hand, approaching CSR as a source of conflict between different stakeholders dates back to Friedman (1970). The author criticises the increasing interest of academics and practitioners in the CSR field and advances his well-known claim that ‘the only responsibility of business is to increase profit’. Extensions of this point of view have often served as a theoretical background to support the negative association between CSR’s degree of involvement and firm value. For instance, Preston and O’Bannon (1997) discuss the managerial opportunism hypothesis and argue that some private managerial goals might lead to a firm’s resources being wasted through overinvestment in CSR. CSR is thus a manifestation of managerial agency problems inside the firm (e.g. Be´nabou and Tirole 2010). Furthermore, through their trade-off hypothesis, Preston and O’Bannon (1997) argue that investing in social and environmental activities is likely to reduce a company’s resources, which creates a competitive disadvantage and negatively affects a firm’s value. On the other hand, the opposite point of view—the value-enhancing view—argues that by serving the implicit claims of their stakeholders (stakeholder theory), high CSR companies enhance their reputation, gain employee loyalty, and benefit from customers’ support. Social activities will therefore result in a positive impact on the companies’ financial performance. Furthermore, good management theory (Waddock and Graves 1997) suggests that managerial and strategic skills that lead to high social performance are the same as those that may also help companies in achieving high financial performance. High social performance is the channel through which firms will achieve their objectives in terms of value maximisation.