The Influence Of Religion On Corporate Philanthropy

Being an essential part of social activity, corporate donation plays a key role in promoting corporation to fulfil their social responsibility and facilitate the redistribution of resources. It not merely improves the overall welfare of society, but also enhances the efficiency of allocating resources. Disadvantaged groups or poor body who are in need of help gained “timely” succor, it not only alleviates the gap between rich and poor and mitigates social conflicts, but also promotes social equity. Many former works have focused on how large a role the formal systems or informal systems play in promoting social development and public sector building. According to their research achievements, although formal systems, e.g. the laws, have a very directly impact on human lives, a majority of people’s lives actions and decisions are mainly determined by the informal systems, especially during the period of economic restructuring because the lagged informal systems will postpone the economic development. A certain amount of works studying informal systems set their eyes on culture, an important component of informal systems, and religion. In our paper, it is starting from the method proposed by Hilary & Hui in 2009[1], and then by using the financial data from the listed corporation in 2013, combining with the announced corporate charitable donations data in this period from the great disaster – Ya’an earthquake, we study the influence of religion on the listed corporations’ charitable donations through a variety of methods and give several robustness tests to verify the relationship between religion and enterprises’ charitable donations.