Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility and Economic Performance

Constantin Belu and Cristiana Manescu

No 362, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper studies the link between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and economic performance of companies. Acknowledging the argument that companies might behave socially responsible strategically, i.e. favoring the CSR dimensions that provide competitive advantages, we construct a novel CSR index based on a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model. We argue that this index accounts for CSR achievements from a strategic perspective, and use it to analyze the link between CSR and economic performance expressed by Return on Assets (ROA). When explicitly accounting for strategic behavior of companies, our findings reveal a significant positive relationship between CSR and economic performance.

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility; Data Envelopment Analysis; Strategic CSR; System-GMM (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 C67 M14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2009-06-11, Revised 2011-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse and nep-eff
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Citations:

Forthcoming as Belu, Constantin and Cristiana Manescu, 'Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility and Economic Performance' in Applied Economics, 2013, pages 2751-2764.

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Journal Article: Strategic corporate social responsibility and economic performance (2013)
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