مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد کیفیت پیش بینی تحلیلگر و مسئولیت اجتماعی شرکت – امرالد 2022

Abstract

Purpose

     This study aims to examine the mediating role played by corporate governance (CG) in the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and analyst forecast quality.

Design/methodology/approach

     The authors raise three specific questions: Does CG play a mediating role in the relationship between CSR and analyst forecast quality? If so, is such mediation effect of CG reduced for firms with weak governance? Do firms with superior CSR performance experience higher analyst forecast quality through the mediation effect of CG?

Findings

     The present results suggest that CG serves as a partial mediator that facilitates CSR’s positive influence on analyst forecast quality. However, further analyses show that in firms with a low governance score, CG does not have a mediation effect. Conversely, the authors find that firms with superior CSR performance have higher forecast quality through the mediation effect of CG. The authors also find that the mediation effect of CG is more pronounced for the environmental component than for the social component of CSR

Originality/value

     To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the role of CG as a mediator between CSR and analyst forecast quality and to reveal that the strength of this effect varies depending on firms’ CG level and CSR commitment.

Introduction

     Informative stock price in financial markets is essential to efficient resource allocation in an economy, and the analyst report is an important avenue to producing a more informed stock price that also leads to better stock performance in the long term (Brav and Lehavy, 2003; Fernandez et al., 2011; Asquith et al., 2005; Lennox and Park, 2006). Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming a significant part of corporate activity, the literature about the influence of CSR on analyst forecast quality offers largely mixed findings. Some studies find that socially responsible firms experience lower levels of conflict among stakeholders, which may reduce information asymmetry in prices and thus result in more accurate analyst forecasts (Al-Hadi et al., 2019; Becchetti et al., 2015). Other studies suggest that CSR can be used by management as a greenwashing strategy to manipulate legitimacy for obtaining societal acceptance (Jo and Harjoto, 2012; Orlitzky, 2013), which can lead to price distortion and potentially mislead analyst forecasts. In an attempt to reconcile these inconclusive findings, we incorporate the unique role of corporate governance (CG) as a mediator, aiming to investigate the mediation effect of firms’ CG on the relationship between CSR and analyst forecast quality

Conclusion

     This study explored the relationship between CSR and analyst forecast quality and examined the mediation effect of CG. Our results reveal that CG acts as a partial mediator affecting the relationship between CSR and analyst forecast quality, and the mediating role of CG is muted in firms with low level of CG mechanism. Further, our results show that for firms committing to excess CSR, CG also plays a partial mediating role in facilitating CSR’s positive influence on forecast quality.

     This study offers two incremental contributions. First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explicitly investigate the role of CG as a mediator between CSR and analyst quality. Second, after splitting CSR into expected CSR and excess CSR, we obtain results that support the signaling hypothesis, indicating that excess CSR engagement by some firms enhances analyst forecast quality through CG as a mediator. Overall, our findings add to extant literature on the nexus of CSR, CG and information asymmetry by providing strong evidence that CG complements CSR to enhance analyst forecast quality.