Causality between corporate social responsibility and corporate financial performance

Abstract

This paper examines the causality relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate financial performance (CFP) of the listed companies in Asian Pacific emerging markets from 2010 to 2020. This paper analyzes the direction of causality between CSR and CFP in five different industries including energy, consumer non-cyclical, financial, technology and healthcare industries. This paper aims to study whether aggregated CSR scores and non-aggregate CSR scores (i.e., environmental, social and governance scores) toward the CFP measures (i.e., return-on-equity and Tobin’s Q ratios) have unidirectional or bidirectional relationship. In doing so, the bivariate panel vector autoregressive model and Granger causality test are used as the main methodology to analyze the unbalance panel data. In addition, several exogeneous factors are included in the model as control variables.

The results reveal that CFP measured by Tobin’s Q ratio negatively influences corporate governance pillar of CSR in energy industry. Moreover, the results show the negative influence of Tobin’s Q toward the aggregated CSR, environment pillar and social pillar in financial industry. These results conclude that the causality relationship between CSR and CFP vary across industries and that the use of different CFP measures generate different results.