How does corporate social responsibility impact banking efficiency: a case in China

Abstract

Much of the earlier literature was focused on the link between corporate social responsibility and corporate fi nancial performance, with contradictory conclusions regarding the impact of corporate social responsibility upon corporate fi nancial performance in the literature. Departing from conventional parametric techniques, this paper employs a fully nonparametric approach to analyze the link between corporate social responsibility and corporate fi nancial performance in Chinese banking sector. Specifi cally, the slack-free Multi-directional Effi ciency Analysis is extended into the conditional effi ciency framework. The results indicate that corporate social responsibility has a signifi cant impact on banking performance, where an increase in CSR generally leads towards an increase in conditional effi ciency, but the attainable frontier might be shifted to any direction for the highest values of corporate social responsibility. In details, the analysis of “pure” effi ciency indicates that corporate social responsibility has a stronger impact on increasing net profi t if compared to that on contracting the amount of non-performing loans. In other words, it turns out that corporate social responsibility is likely to affect the attainable frontier in the direction of expanding net profi t rather than contracting non-performing loans, because the portfolio of non-performing loans is diffi cult to reduce and therefore the impact of corporate social responsibility is not signifi cant either on the frontier or on average effi ciency. However, there exists a trade-off between corporate social responsibility and bank performance when a certain limit is exceeded in Chinese banking. Thus, a minimal increase in corporate social responsibility is likely to contribute to improvements in banking performance (productivity), whereas a negative effect is observed at the highest levels of corporate social responsibility.