Effects of Corporate Life Cycle on Corporate Social Responsibility: Evidence from Korea

Woo Jae Lee and Seung Uk Choi
Additional contact information
Woo Jae Lee: College of Economics and Management, Chungnam National University, Daejeon 34134, Korea
Seung Uk Choi: Department of Accounting and Taxation, School of Management, Kyung Hee University, Seoul 02447, Korea

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 10, 1-17

Abstract: Few studies examine how firms make strategic decisions over time. In this study, we test whether a firm undertakes corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities as a function of its life-cycle stage. Drawing on prior CSR research that finds ethical concerns and opportunistic behavior to be two key motivations that underpin CSR activities, we hypothesize that firms in their growth stage are positively associated with CSR, while firms in stage of decline are less likely to invest in CSR. The empirical findings of our study—derived by leveraging a sample of South Korean listed firms—are consistent with these predictions. We further find that in the growth stage, group-affiliated firms are more engaged in CSR than are unaffiliated firms. Given that affiliated firms can share the resources of other group-member firms, this evidence supports the slack resource hypothesis. Overall, our results indicate that firms have different CSR strategies, depending on their life-cycle stage.

Keywords: corporate life cycle; corporate social responsibility (CSR); group-affiliation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/10/3794/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/10/3794/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:10:p:3794-:d:177032

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().