Corporate social responsibility and firm efficiency: a latent class stochastic frontier analysis

The nexus between corporate social responsibility and corporate performance is of fundamental importance to understand if the former can be a sustainable strategy in the competitive race. In this paper we test this relationship on a sample of firms observed in a 13-year interval by focusing on a performance indicator (productive efficiency) seldom explored in this literature with a novel approach (latent class stochastic frontiers). Our empirical findings show that firms included in the Domini 400 index (a CSR stock market index) do not appear to be more distant from the production frontier than firms in the control sample after controlling for the heterogeneity of production structure.