On the Relationship between CSR and Financial Performance: An empirical study of US firms
2012 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (Two Years)), 80 credits / 120 HE credits
Student thesis
Abstract [en]
Corporations care more and more about their social responsible performance, and this stands to reason. Conscience, business ethics and pressure of public opinion are playing important roles. Furthermore, some evidence shows that better CSR performance may bring the financial performance of a corporation to a higher stage. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate financial performance (CFP). Drawing on the triple bottom line principle and the stakeholder theory, we divided the stakeholders that corporations should take re-sponsibility for into seven categories: shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, creditors, community and environment (natural environment). We used a quantitative method to conduct the empirical study. The empirical study is based on samples of 95 US listed firms. We have used seven CSR indicators as inde-pendent variables and the CFP index as dependent variable. The independent variables concern CSR performance on shareholders, customers, suppliers, creditors, employees, community and environment. SPSS software was used as a help for investigating the correlation between the dependent variable and each independent variables. We run a multi-index regression using the indexes we calculated or got directly from databases. There is a significant positive short-term relationship between CSR for employees and CFP and a significant negative short-term relationship between CSR for community and CFP. Our main results show that the seven groups of stakeholders (including environ-ment) can be divided into three groups: fast responders, long term responders, and occa-sional supporter.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2012. , p. 51
Keywords [en]
corporate social responsibility, corporate financial performance, relationship, stakeholder theory
National Category
Business Administration
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-18255OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hj-18255DiVA, id: diva2:530678
Subject / course
IHH, Business Administration
Uppsok
Social and Behavioural Science, Law
Supervisors
Examiners
2012-06-132012-06-042012-06-13Bibliographically approved