Does firms' commitment towards CSR influence idiosyncratic volatility? Evidence from India

Neeru Chaudhry and Priya Dhawan

Emerging Markets Review, 2025, vol. 68, issue C

Abstract: Inconclusive evidence on how CSR affects idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) is potentially because of different approaches used to measure firms' CSR performance. We use the actual amount spent on CSR activities to measure firms' CSR performance. For a sample of 20,410 firm-year observations and 2000–2021 period, we show that as firms' CSR spending increases, IVOL decreases. This relationship becomes stronger as social-and-community and employee-welfare spending increases but is insensitive to spending on environmental-protection. Cash flow volatility and financial-constraints decreases, and firm valuation improves with employee-welfare spending. It is important to integrate CSR with risk-management-strategies at the firm-level and policy-formulation at the economy-level.

Keywords: Corporate social responsibility; Idiosyncratic risk; Idiosyncratic volatility; India; Emerging economies; Employee treatment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G12 G30 G32 M14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1566014125000809
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ememar:v:68:y:2025:i:c:s1566014125000809

DOI: 10.1016/j.ememar.2025.101331

Access Statistics for this article

Emerging Markets Review is currently edited by Jonathan A. Batten

More articles in Emerging Markets Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().