 Corporate social responsibility, corporate financial performance and the confounding effects of economic fluctuations: A meta-analysisKaixing Huang (), Nicholas Sim and Hong Zhao International Review of Financial Analysis, 2020, vol. 70, issue C Abstract: Due to public concerns and regulatory forces, managers are paying increasingly more attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Efforts to improve CSR are widely believed to be beneficial for increasing a firm's value; yet, evidence on how CSR affects corporate financial performance (CFP) has been mixed. To understand why the literature has been divided on the impact of CSR on CFP, we carry out a meta-analysis based on 437 primary studies. We discover that among various factors, much of the disagreement in the literature can be traced to the confounding influence of macro-level economic fluctuations, which were often overlooked by CSR-CFP studies. We show that if the primary studies are either unconfounded by economic fluctuations, or have addressed them econometrically, the non-consensus in the literature can be reconciled and the true positive effect of CSR on CFP can be observed. Keywords: Economic fluctuations; Corporate social responsibility; Corporate financial performance; Omitted variable bias; Meta-analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:finana:v:70:y:2020:i:c:s1057521920301484 DOI: 10.1016/j.irfa.2020.101504 Access Statistics for this article International Review of Financial Analysis is currently edited by B.M. Lucey More articles in International Review of Financial Analysis from Elsevier |
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