Essays on corporate social responsibility
Creators: name: Zhao, Keyi
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2021

description: The topic of this dissertation is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), with a focus on CSR disclosure and measurement. The dissertation consists of three chapters, including a literature review and two empirical studies on impression management in companies' CSR reports based on a dataset of CSR reports issued by U.S. companies between the year 2005 and 2018. Chapter 1 is a literature review of CSR disclosure and measurement. The demand for reliable CSR data is rising rapidly, as investors increasingly use nonfinancial information as screening criteria when making investment decisions. However, critiques have arisen from both academia and the industry about CSR-rating products. Researchers, for example, have expressed concerns about the credibility of the measurements commonly used in research, such as KLD scores. This literature review aims to give users of CSR information an overview of publicly available data sources. It also investigates major products that provide CSR ratings for public companies and analyzes concerns expressed about those products. Finally, it summarizes the difficulties in constructing CSR performance scores and discusses the open questions in CSR disclosure and measurement and outlines potential directions for future research.Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 test whether companies use images and linguistic features, respectively, for impression management purposes and the consequences of doing so. Chapter 2 is a study on the use of images in CSR reports. Prior research identifies images as a tool for corporate impression management. We examine (1) associations between CSR report image usage and motivations for impression management, (2) changes in CSR report image usage after controversial events, and (3) shareholder and award giver reactions to excessive image usage. We document that socially problematic industries exhibit higher image usage than others. We also document that firms who issue less extensive disclosure content or do not voluntarily commit to Global Initiative Reporting (GRI) guidelines in CSR reports tend to use more images. We find that firms with poorer ratings of CSR performance use more images in CSR reports and find some evidence indicating that firms increase image usage after controversial events. We find that excessive image usage is weakly associated with increased equity overvaluation and reduced shareholder activism, but no association with CSR awards. Overall, the evidence is consistent with companies strategically using images in CSR reports to enhance stakeholder perception of CSR engagement and performance. Such strategic usage has impacts on some audiences, though less than experimental evidence leads us to expect.Chapter 3 is a study of the linguistic characteristics of CSR reports. Based on a classification of financial information disclosures as soft or hard, this study 1) uses linguistic features of CSR reports to proxy for hard and soft disclosure and to investigate whether companies strategically use the two types of information in CSR reports according to companies’ CSR performance, 2) examines the predictive power of the two types of information on future CSR performance, and 3) investigates the impacts of the information on decision-making. This study finds that companies adopt two strategies of communication. Those with low CSR strengths disclose less hard information, that is, numerical and specific information, and more soft “filler” language in their CSR reports. Those with high CSR concerns disclose more soft, forward-looking statements after controlling for government and media monitoring. What’s more, though forward-looking statements lack overall predictive power, those statements can better predict future performance when the CSR reports are assured. As for the consequences of the linguistic disclosure, hard information can weakly reduce shareholder activism and increase the likelihood of recognition via external awards. In contrast, boilerplate language does not benefit companies. Overall, the results suggest that the strategic use of linguistics in CSR reports does not significantly induce information users to make decisions in favor of the companies.