企业产权、社会责任与权益资本成本

企业社会责任是否是企业为社会利益而牺牲自身利润的行为一直是学术界争论的焦点，文章尝试从资本市场参与者的角度出发，通过考察我国上市公司的社会责任履行情况对权益资本成本的影响来回答这个问题。研究发现：（1）良好的社会责任表现确实能显著降低企业的权益资本成本，其中改善企业对投资者的责任起到的作用最为突出；（2）与非国有企业相比，目前国有企业的社会责任履行情况更好且权益资本成本更低，但是积极的社会责任行为在非国有样本中更能发挥降低权益资本成本的作用。

Corporate Social Responsibility,Ownership and the Cost of Equity Capital

Recently, whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) is priced by capital markets has become an important issue, especially for China where institutional settings are quite different from other parts of the world. This study examines the effect of CSR towards primary stakeholders on the cost of equity capital of Chinese listed firms, and divides the sample into state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-state-owned enterprises (NSOEs) to compare. We construct a set of CSR index system to measure the quality of the CSR practices and use several approaches to estimate firms’ ex ante cost of equity capital. The results show that firms with higher CSR scores enjoy significantly lower cost of equity capital. In particular, we also find that investment in improving CSR towards investors make the greatest contribution to reducing firms’ equity financing costs. In addition, SOEs have better CSR and lower cost of equity capital than NSOEs, but the effect of CSR in reducing the cost of equity capital will be greater for NSOEs than for SOEs. Findings suggest that CSR toward primary stakeholders can be profitable and beneficial to Chinese firms.