Impact of Corporate Governance on CSR in Slovak Insurance Companies

Abstract

Corporate governance creates important signals that the company sends to its surroundings. It affects the performance of the company and consequently the satisfaction of owners and employees, the trust of creditors, clients, and all other interest groups. There are several ways to gain their trust and satisfaction. One of them is to present information on financial support for activities that are called corporate social responsibility (CSR). The application of the CSR in practice is all the more important in companies providing insurance services, which are often referred to in the literature as trust-based products. There is only little attention paid to the research of corporate governance in relation to corporate social responsibility in insurance companies. Therefore, in our contribution, we examine the impact of selected determinants of corporate governance on corporate social responsibility information disclosure in insurance companies based in Slovakia. We use the basic methods of regression and correlation analysis to quantify this relationship. The selection of explanatory determinants of CG is carried out in accordance with the assumption of shareholders’ and stakeholders’ theories of management. The goal is to find out which set of variables will better explain the impact of corporate governance on CSR reporting. The results of the analysis showed that the model based on stakeholder’s theory assumptions explains the changes in reporting CSR information better.