Do Firms with Historical Loss Disclose Less Social Responsibility Information?

Abstract

Purpose: This research aims to empirically investigate the motivation of corporate voluntary disclosure by exploring the impact of historical loss on corporate social responsibility disclosure (CSRD). Research design, data, and methodology: This paper takes Chinese A-share listed firms that issued standalone social responsibility reports during the period of 2009-2017 as a sample. Drawing on extant literature, this paper defines historical loss firms as firms with net profit greater than or equal to 0 and undistributed profit less than 0. The tendency score matching method (PSM) is used to find matching samples for historical loss firms. Then OLS regression is conducted to investigate the relationship between historical loss and corporate social disclosure. Results: The results show that historical loss has a significant positive impact on the quality of corporate social responsibility disclosure. After changing the measurement of independent and dependent variables as well as adopting different matching methods to screen the control group, the results still hold. Further research indicates that the relationship between historical loss and CSRD is influenced by corporate financing constraints and industry competition. Conclusions: This research supports the resource motivation hypothesis of corporate social responsibility disclosure, and provides empirical evidence for regulators to strengthen supervision on corporate disclosure.