Can country trade flows benefit from improved corporate social responsibility ratings?

We set out in this study to examine the effects of country ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) ratings on the international trade flows of 28 countries. Drawing on categorization theory, we examine whether country CSR engagement is a categorizing factor capable of influencing the overall process of categorization. Based upon a two-stage approach, comprising of gravity and panel Tobit models, we find that a country's CSR rating has significantly positive effects on the country's international trade flows. When the CSR rating of a country is higher than that of another rival trading country, this will have significantly positive effects on the bilateral trade flows between the two countries.     

Does corporate social responsibility reduce financial distress risk?

This paper examines how corporate social responsibility (CSR) affects the level of financial distress risk (FDR). Using a sample of 1201 US-listed firms during 1991–2012, our results indicate that firms with higher CSR levels have lower FDR, suggesting that a better CSR performance makes firms more creditworthy and have better access to financing, which is rewarded with less financial defaults. This finding is robust to using alternative proxies of FDR, to controlling for potential endogeneity, and is mainly driven by the community, diversity, employee relations, and environmental dimensions of CSR. Moreover, this relationship is more prevalent in firms with strong governance mechanisms and high product market competition. It is also more exacerbated for less distressed firms and during non-crisis periods. Overall, our findings suggest that the adoption of CSR practices comes with less distress and default risks, likely leading to a more attractive corporate environment, better financial stability and more crisis-resilient economies.     

Tariffs and privatization policy in a bilateral trade with corporate social responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a global business strategy and thus it provides significant welfare implications for designing optimal policies. This paper investigates the impact of CSR on policy interaction between tariffs and privatization in an international bilateral trade model. We find that CSR is closely related to the government's policy decisions on tariffs. In particular, we find that the strategic tariff for increasing domestic welfare is always higher (lower) than the efficient tariff for improving global welfare when the degree of CSR is low (high). We also show that a privatization policy raises tariff and worsens (improves) domestic welfare when the degree of CSR is low (high). Finally, we demonstrate that both countries choose a nationalization policy even though the privatization policy is globally optimal when the degree of CSR is high.     

Assessing whether corporate social responsibility influence corporate value

This study used the corporate social responsibility (CSR) index to gauge the corporate value and social responsibility performance of corporations in Taiwan. We investigated whether CSR influences corporate value and whether the extent of that influence varies with corporate value or time. The results indicate that the influence of CSR on corporate value does not change with time. CSR exerts a positive influence on company value, and this influence does not change over time. However, the extent of the influence significantly varies with corporate value. When the corporate value of a company is not high, investing in CSR would only increase costs and fail to effectively increase corporate value. In contrast, if the corporate value of the company is high, investments in CSR in this circumstance would instead promote the effective increase of corporate value.     

Corporate Social Responsibility Spillover and Competition Effects on the Food Industry

This paper examines the spillover and competition effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) with duopoly competition. In employing the assumption that firm CSR increases consumer willingness to pay for the firm's products while consumer willingness to pay decreases for non‐CSR firm products, some interesting conclusions are achieved. First, CSR spillover effects increase CSR firm outputs and prices, while CSR spillover has the opposite effect on competitors. Second, CSR spillover decreases total outputs and total social welfare levels. Third, competition effects increase CSR expenditures, and CSR firms' CSR policies are the most robust when non‐CSR firms assume a leading position. It is found that total outputs and consumer utilities are highest when CSR firm acts as leader, while the relationships of social welfare among different cases are ambiguous depending on product substitution and spillover effects.     

Socially responsible firms and endogenous choice of strategic incentives

In this paper we are analyzing a mixed quantity-setting duopoly consisting of a socially concerned firm and a profit-maximizing firm. The socially concerned firm considers one group of stakeholders in its objective function and maximizes its profit plus a share of consumer surplus. Both firms have the option to hire a manager who determines the production quantity on behalf of the firm's owner. We find that in the subgame-perfect equilibrium of this game both firms hire a manager and delegate the production choice. If the unit production costs of the firms are similar, then the socially concerned firm has a higher market share and even higher profit. Interestingly, we observe that the relationship between the share of consumer surplus taken into account by the socially concerned firm and its profit is non-monotonic. As the share increases, the socially concerned firm's profit first increases and then decreases. The conclusion is that it pays off to take stakeholder interests into account, but not too much.     

The impact of corporate social responsibility activities on corporate financing: a case of bank loan covenants

We examine the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities on the intensity of loan covenants, one of the most important nonpricing terms of syndicated loan contracts. Undocumented in the existing literature, we offer new evidence that while CSR strengths have little impact on loan covenants, CSR concerns lead to stricter loan covenants. These asymmetric results suggest that while lenders view CSR strengths as discretionary, they are more concerned about value-destroying CSR concerns, which induces the lenders to screen out firms engaging in nonsocially responsible activities and penalize these firms with stricter loan covenants. Combined with the evidence on the CSR-loan spread association in the existing literature, our results provide strong evidence that CSR matters to both pricing and nonpricing terms of loan contracts.     

Global corporate social responsibility reporting regulation

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has steadily grown in importance. We show government regulation on corporate reporting of CSR, aimed to spur its growth and increase transparency, has grown in tandem. Such reporting regulation is more readily observable than CSR itself and can be used as a proxy for the latter. We show that larger economies with higher institutional capacity find it easier to develop reporting regulations, and that international influences and local pollution increase concerns are important contributing factors. We show that such regulation also increases CSR, even after accounting for common unobserved factors that may affect both.     

Profitability of corporate social responsibility in network industries

The present paper shows that, when firms compete in a non-cooperative way on the level of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in network industries, the conventional result of the prisoner’s dilemma structure of the game in standard industries—i.e. to have social concerns is the Nash equilibrium, but it is harmful for firms’ profits—vanishes and, for sufficiently intense network externalities, the equilibrium in which both firms have social concerns is more profitable than simple profit-seeking. Moreover, we show that—when firms cooperate in choosing the profit-maximising level of social concerns—a profit-maximising CSR level does exist, provided that network effects are sufficiently strong. Therefore, in network industries, firms may obtain higher profits engaging in—cooperatively as well as non-cooperatively—CSR activities, showing that firms’ social concerns may be motivated by the owners’ selfish behaviour. Finally, a counter-intuitive result as regards consumer’s surplus and social welfare is obtained: those are always higher under competitive than cooperative choice of CSR because the level of CSR activities is higher in the former case. However, given that firms gain their largest profits with the cooperative choice of CSR, a Pareto-superior outcome is not reached.     

Asymmetric access price regulation in telecommunications markets

In liberalized telecommunications markets, the incumbent typically enjoys several advantages over any entrant. Regulation in such asymmetric markets stimulates competition in the short and the long term if retail prices are low and the entrant's profits are high so that entry is encouraged. I show that asymmetric access price regulation with a cost-based access price for the incumbent and an access markup for the entrant is more successful than cost-based access price regulation applied to incumbent and entrant. This is a robust prediction with respect to the pricing strategies considered. Such asymmetric access price regulation is in accordance with European legislation.     

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.     

Group insurance and lending with endogenous social collateral

We construct a dynamic model of self-enforcing insurance provision and lending to a community of borrowers who are connected by risk-sharing arrangements that are themselves subject to enforcement problems, as in Kocherlakota (1996). We show that an outside lender offering constant-consumption contracts can earn a higher profit if he conditions his repeated interactions with each borrower on the history of his interactions with all the group members (a joint liability contract), rather than on his history with that borrower only (individual liability contracts). This result holds even in the absence of informational asymmetries. The observation driving it is that with individual liability contracts, a joint welfare-maximizing group may prefer to have one or more group members default on their contracts, so that the group can consume a mix of outside funds and the defaulters' stochastic income. One contribution of our work is to give precise economic content to the concept of “social collateral” as the per-agent surplus from group risk-sharing over autarky. The group can deter its members from defaulting on their contracts with the principal by threatening to reduce that surplus.     

Divestitures,privatization and corporate performance in emerging markets

We use new firm‐level data to examine the effects of firm divestitures and privatization on corporate performance in a rapidly emerging market economy. Unlike the existing literature, we control for accompanying ownership changes and the fact that divestitures and ownership are potentially endogenous variables. We find that divestitures increase the firm's profitability but do not alter its scale of operations, while the effect of privatization depends on the resulting ownership structure – sometimes improving performance and sometimes bringing about decline. The effects of privatization are thus more nuanced than suggested in earlier studies. Methodologically, our study provides evidence that it is important to control for changes in ownership when analyzing divestitures and to control for endogeneity, selection and data attrition when analyzing the effects of divestitures and privatization.     

Determinants of innovative activity in oligopolistic markets

This paper analyzes some important factors determining firms' innovative activity by using a dynamic stochastic oligopoly model. We suppose that the rivals in an industry maximize their expected discounted cash flows with respect to R&D expenditures and output levels. Optimal innovative activity is shown to depend positively on market size, but negatively on demand and technological uncertainty, spillovers, and interest rates. Using an isoelastic demand function, we can show that, if spillovers are modest and demand is relatively inelastic, firms' maximum innovative activity is not necessarily to be expected in the monopoly case. The maximum may also occur in either a duopoly or triopoly.Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik in Lugano, October 2–4, 1991. I would like to thank David Audretsch, Werner Güth, Ernst Helmstädter, Wolfgang Leininger, Manfred Neumann, Hans-Jürgen Ramser, Wolfram Richter, and Peter Zweifel for their helpful comments and suggestions. I am particularly indebted to three anonymous referees for many helpful suggestions. The financial support of the DFG in Bonn is gratefully acknowledged.     

Welfare effects of competitive lobbying efforts in international oligopoly markets

Conventionally, rent-seeking activities have been considered to deteriorate social welfare and to distort resource allocation. This paper examines whether rent-seeking behavior can improve social welfare by focusing on the welfare effects of firms’ competitive lobbying efforts when governments can impose market entry regulation against foreign firms. We demonstrate that competitive lobbying efforts can improve social welfare when such lobbying efforts are directed to reduce market entry barriers. In addition, social welfare can be maximized when the government shows the maximum sensitivity to the foreign firm's political contributions while maintaining competitive market structure. Moreover, it is shown that the dominant strategy for a domestic firm is to allocate more resources to R&D sectors while it is optimal for foreign firms is to exert more efforts in lobbying to reduce the market entry barriers when a government makes political economic approach in market entry regulations.     

Strategic interaction between futures and spot markets

We study an oligopolistic industry where firms are able to sell in a futures market at infinitely many moments prior to the spot market. A kind of Folk-theorem is established: any outcome between perfect competition and Cournot can be sustained in equilibrium. We then find that the Cournot outcome can be sustained by a renegotiation-proof equilibrium. However, this is not true for the competitive outcome. Furthermore, only the monopolistic outcome is renegotiation-proof if firms can buy and sell in the futures market. These results suggest, contrary to existing literature, that the introduction of futures markets may have an anti-competitive effect.     

Dynamic model and driving strategy of corporate social responsibility

Corporate social responsibility is the inevitable requirement for the survival and development of enterprises in modern society, as well as the basic guarantee for the sustainable development of economy and society. In order to analyze the driving factors of corporate social responsibility from both internal and external aspects, the dynamic model of corporate social responsibility was constructed, and the driving strategies of corporate social responsibility were also suggested. The driving fac...     

Reallocation of corporate resources and managerial incentives in internal capital markets

Diversified firms often trade at a discount with respect to their focused counterparts. The literature has tried to explain the apparent misallocation of resources with lobbying activities or power struggles. We show that diversification can destroy value even when resources are efficiently allocated ex post. When managers derive utility from the funds under their purview, moving funds across divisions may diminish their incentives. The ex ante reduction in managerial incentives can more than offset the increase in firm value due to the ex post efficient reallocation of funds. This effect is robust to the introduction of monetary incentives. Moreover we show that asymmetries in size and growth prospects increase the diversification discount.     

The design of voluntary agreements in oligopolistic markets

This paper analyses the conditions under which a group of firms have the incentive to sign a voluntary agreement (VA) to control polluting emissions even in the presence of free-riding by other firms in the industry. We consider a policy framework in which firms in a given industry decide whether or not to sign a VA proposed by an environmental regulator. We identify the features that a VA should possess in order to provide firms with an incentive to participate in the VA and to enhance its economic and environmental effectiveness. Under very general conditions on the shape of the demand schedule, we obtain the following results. First, a VA does not belong to the equilibrium of the coalition game when benefits from voluntary emission abatement are a pure public good, unless an industry emission target is set by the regulator. Second, in the presence of partial spillovers—i.e. when signatories obtain more benefits from the VA than non-signatories—a VA can belong to the equilibrium only if a minimum participation rule is guaranteed. Third, a VA with a minimum participation rule and a minimum mandatory emission abatement may improve welfare (and even industry profits) compared to a VA in which firms are free to set their own profit maximizing abatement level.     

企业社会责任、现金股利与投资效率

本文选择我国2008-2016年沪深两市的A股上市公司作为研究样本,首先实证检验了企业承担社会责任对企业现金股利分配的影响。研究结果表明,社会责任表现越好的企业其更倾向于派发或连续派发现金股利,并且现金股利支付率越高。接下来本文对企业发放现金股利与投资效率的关系进行了研究。研究表明,企业发放现金股利通过减少企业的自由现金流抑制代理问题,缓解了自由现金流富余的企业的过度投资,连续派现向市场传递出的积极信号为企业带来新的融资,缓解了自由现金流紧缺的企业的投资不足。最后,本文进一步研究了企业社会责任在现金股利与投资效率的相关关系中发挥了何种调节作用,研究结果显示企业通过履行社会责任增加现金股利的发放,进而可以显著提高现金股利对过度投资的抑制作用。履行社会责任的企业更倾向于连续派现,从而提高了现金股利对投资不足的缓解程度。