Does The Corporate Social Responsibility Report Affect Analyst Forecast Accuracy?

Corporate social responsibility report is an important way to convey the information of corporate social responsibility and an important part of the non-financial information of the enterprise. Through the analysis of the influence of China’s current corporate social responsibility report to analysts’ earnings forecasts, this paper explores the information value and economic consequences of the disclosure of the corporate social responsibility report in the emerging capital market.This paper uses the data of Chinese listed firms spanning 2009 to 2013 and chooses the listed firms which disclose social responsibility report as sample. From the perspective of discussing the influence of social responsibility report to analyst forecast accuracy,this paper try to examine the economic consequences of social responsibility report. This paper found the following three conclusions:Firstly, the disclosure of corporate social responsibility report can increase the short-term analyst forecast accuracy, but can’t significantly affect the analyst long-term forecasts accuracy. Secondly, the quality of corporate social responsibility report has a significant impact on analyst short-term and long-term forecasts accuracy. Thirdly, corporate social responsibility report assurance can improve analyst long-term forecast accuracy, but can’t significantly affect the accuracy analysts’ short-term earnings forecasts accuracy. There are seven parts in this thesis:The first part, introduction. This part mainly introduces the motivation, research ideas, structure arrangement, theoretical and practical significance of the paper, and the innovation of the paper.The second part, literature review. This part first review and comment on literature about economic consequences of corporate social responsibility, quality and assurance of corporate social responsibility report.Secondly, we review and comment on concept of stock market analysts, and influence factors of earnings forecast. Finally, we review the the related theories and lay theoretical basis for the empirical test.The third part, the present situation of social responsibility report disclosure in our country.Through the analyze of the characteristics of the industry, the ownership and the contents of the disclosure of social responsibility report, we describe the current situation of the social responsibility report disclosure in our country.The fourth part, the theoretical analysis and assumptions. From the perspective of stakeholder, we analyze the connotation of corporate social responsibility. Through the analysis of the economic consequences of corporate social responsibility report, report quality and assurance,we put forward the hypothesis.The fifth part, the research design. This part mainly includes the selection of the sample, the selection of data, the construction of the model and the definition of the variables.The sixth part, the empirical test and the result analysis. Firstly, descriptive statistics and correlation analysis about the quality of our corporate social responsibility report and assurance with analysts earnings forecasts accuracy. Followed by a multivariate regression analysis, robustness tests and further testing in order to overcome endogenous.The seventh part, policy recommendations, research limitations and prospects. The current situation of China corporate social responsibility report disclosure and verification of the recommendations, and noted study limitations and further research direction of this paper。The meaning of this paper lies in:Firstly,this paper discusses the economic consequences of corporate social responsibility report from three dimension:the disclosure of social responsibility report, quality level and assurance level.So, this paper provides more perspective than previous studies. Secondly, this paper analyzes the impact of social responsibility report assurance on analyst earnings forecast accuracy. Thirdly, according to the time interval of analysts’ earnings forecasts are differentiated, analysts target earnings and the forecast are for the current year, one year ahead, or two years ahead. Collectively, our findings have important implications for academics and practitioners in understanding the function of corporate social responsibility report disclosure in financial markets.