Strategic corporate social responsibility and economic performance

• This article proposes a novel Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) index based on a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model. Acknowledging the argument that companies might favour those CSR dimensions that provide strategic competitive advantages, we argue that the index can capture companies' strategic approach to CSR. Furthermore, our findings reveal a neutral relationship between this strategic CSR index and economic performance as measured by Return on Assets (ROA) and Tobin's Q, when controlling for firm unobserved heterogeneity and past economic performance. By contrast, an equally-weighted index of the same CSR indicators is found to be negatively related with ROA, which reinforces our claim that this specific DEA-based index is a measure of strategic CSR.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Nationalekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Economics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

corporate social responsibility

data envelopment analysis

strategic CSR

difference-GMM

data envelopment analysis

public-goods

panel-data

models

profitability

efficiency

outputs

arnes a

1978

european journal of operational research

v2

p429

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)