Reseach On The Mutual Influence And Delayed Action Of Corporate Social Responsibility And Financial Performance

After the concept of corporate social responsibility have been proposed in 1920 s, scholars have put forward the theory of social responsibility and social responsibility evaluation system by studying nearly a century. It is difficult to measure corporate social responsibility. When the social responsibility accounting has been proposed, scholars began to measure corporate social responsibility performance through the development of corporate social responsibility in the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement. Today, most of them use content analysis, reputation index, the index score and accounting disclosure act to measure corporate social responsibility. With further research about the theory of corporate social responsibility, they have been paying more attention on the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance. Among nearly three decades, scholars have done a lot of empirical researches about the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance. On the one hand, scholars have got the results that corporate social performance can effect corporate financial performance, corporate financial performance can effect corporate social performance and they do not effect each other. On the other hand, scholars have got the results that they have positive correlation, they have negative correlation, they have U correlation and they don’t have relation.The research on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate financial performance is motivated by the desire to provide a convincing rationale for managers to adopt socially responsible practices. But the aggregate results of this work are contradictory and ambiguous. The objective of this study is to put forward a theoretical model of the mutual influence of corporate social responsibility and corporate financial performance,and empirically test the relationship between the change in corporate social responsibility and corporate financial performance. At the same time, the study also considered the influence of lag factors.At first, the research background of the study between corporate social responsibility and corporate financial performance is provided by two parts, one part is the findings of the research abroad, and another one is the domestic research, in order to build the theoretical analysis framework to the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate financial performance. Secondly, we have proposed the concept of corporate social responsibility and financial performance, then we analyzed the theory and put forward the hypothesis. Thirdly, we employed four regression models to formally investigate the research questions. The two multiple regression models are to test the effects of corporate social responsibility on financial performance. The other is to examine the influence of corporate financial performance on corporate social responsibility, by the factor analysis and the multiple regression analysis.The results show that corporate social responsibility significantly gives more influence to the financial performance of the next period, compared with this period. This result also applied to the four aspects of corporate social responsibility. The influence of corporate financial performance on corporate social responsibility shows that if company has a better profitability, it would have a worse corporate social responsibility performance in the short term. However, better solvency can significantly improve their corporate social responsibility performance in the short term. And the growth capacity can influence next two periods corporate social responsibility performance.