CSR Quality Research Articles

Corporate Social Responsibility And The Quality Of Executive Compensation Disclosures

This paper examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility and executive compensation disclosure quality. We test whether socially responsible firms disclose more transparent and detailed information about their executive compensation packages than firms that are less committed to social responsibility initiatives. Using a sample of 187 publicly listed Canadian firms, we find a positive relation between CSR and executive compensation disclosure quality. We also document a positive (negative) association between firm size (ownership concentration) and executive compensation disclosure. These findings support the conclusion that increased disclosure transparency reflects a companys social engagement towards its stakeholders.

The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility, Service Quality and Customer-company Identification on Customers

Despite the importance of corporate social responsibility (hereafter CSR) as an important construct in academia and a pressing item on corporate agenda, some contradictory results suggesting that CSR is far away from being the most dominant criteria in purchase behavior call for further research on the topic. Research supporting this view suggests that traditional criteria such as price, quality and brand familiarity are still the most important choice criteria. Acknowledging the significant role that quality can play in the context of services, this study incorporates these two separate views and considers the effect that both CSR and service quality have on customer-related outcomes such as customer- company identification, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. The study also investigates the mediating role of customer- company identification, pointing to the fact that improving customers’ psychological attachment to a company can serve as a strategic tool for enhancing the effect that CSR and service quality have on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. To test the hypothesized relationships, an online questionnaire is conducted to a sample of 242 bank customers.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Stock Market Effi ciency

We investigate the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (hereafter CSR) and I/B/E/S analysts' earnings per share (EPS) forecasts using a large sample of US firms for the 1992-2011 period. Based on literature fi ndings we decompose the CSR eff ect into four factors: accounting opacity, corporate governance, stakeholder risk, and overinvestment. We document that all of them signi ficantly aff ect both the absolute forecast error on EPS and its standard deviation controlling for forecast horizon, number of analysts and forecasts, and for year, industry, broker house eff ects. Consistently with our ex ante hypotheses, overinvestment, stakeholder risk and accounting opacity have a positive e ffect increasing both dependent variables, while corporate governance quality has a negative e ffect. A crucial aspect of our fi ndings is that high CSR quality in terms of the four factors (i.e. accounting transparency, high corporate governance quality, stakeholder risk mitigation and absence of overinvestment) contributes to making earning forecasts unbiased as unbiasedness is generally met in the subsample of the top 33 percent CSR quality companies, while it is markedly violated in the subsample of the bottom 33 percent CSR companies.

Establishing strategic CSR in SMEs: an Austrian CSR quality seal to substantiate the strategic CSR performance

AbstractIntegrating CSR into their strategy system can help enterprises to produce a competitive advantage. This can both add to their long‐term prosperity and help increase overall sustainability, provided they use a broad, dynamic approach to CSR that is compatible with strategic management. SMEs in particular often feature excellent responsibility performance, without realizing it and without trying to benefit from it.In Austria, as in other countries, SMEs often suppose CSR to be a domain of large enterprises: too bureaucratic, expensive, time‐consuming and complex. This paper presents a case from Austria, the development of an official CSR Quality Seal directed at SMEs to help them communicate their sustainability performance effectively and display a visible sign for their stakeholders. The seal was devised to meet objections to the application of standardized CSR tools in industry, especially in SMEs. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

How to develop a CSR quality assurance program.

How to develop a CSR quality assurance program.