On the Foundations of Corporate Social Responsibility

2016/12/06 by Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog · 3 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Accounting #Business #Civil law (Civil law) #Commercial law #Corporate Finance and Governance #Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting #Corporate social responsibility #Corruption and Economic Development #Economics #Globalization #Law #Market economy #Natural disaster #Political science #Politics #Social responsibility

paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/jofi.12487

openalex publication_date 2016/12/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings for 23,000 companies from 114 countries, we find that a firm's CSR rating and its country's legal origin are strongly correlated. Legal origin is a stronger explanation than “doing good by doing well” factors or firm and country characteristics (ownership concentration, political institutions, and globalization): firms from common law countries have lower CSR than companies from civil law countries, with Scandinavian civil law firms having the highest CSR ratings. Evidence from quasi‐natural experiments such as scandals and natural disasters suggests that civil law firms are more responsive to CSR shocks than common law firms.

Citations

• Corporate social responsibility and access to finance
• What drives corporate social performance? The role of nation-level institutions
• Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England
• Toward a New Conception of the Environment-Competitiveness Relationship
• Corporate Social Responsibility, Customer Satisfaction, and Market Value
• Investor protection and corporate governance
• Corporate Social and Financial Performance: A Meta-Analysis
• Socially responsible firms
• Individual and Corporate Social Responsibility
• Law and Finance
• Corporate goodness and shareholder wealth
• Incentives and Prosocial Behavior

Cited by

• Creating shared value: A systematic review, synthesis and integrative perspective
• Disentangling ESG: Environmental, social and governance ratings and financial performance of Polish listed companies
• Corporate social responsibility [wikipedia]

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