Author: Amal El aouadi

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

This thesis consists of three empirical essays investigating the role of investor attention as a determinant of the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and financial performance. Our aim is to rethink the controversial literature on the financial implications of CSR activities by exploring a new premise - investor attention may shape the financial returns on corporate social impact. Since a growing stream of literature has highlighted the role of firm visibility as well as stakeholder attention to connect CSP to financial performance in addition to the complementary literature of investor attention and stock prices, we expect that controlling for firm-specific investor attention would provide novel insights to the literature on the potential financial effects of CSP.A consistent strand of literature has provided interesting evidence of a strong relationship between the firm CSP and its stakeholders such as consumers, employees, suppliers, investors, analysts, activists and communities, and regulators, with the benefits being stronger, the greater the attention to and salience of social activities among stakeholders. We complement and extend this literature by implementing a more granular analysis and particularly we focus on the relevance of investors' attention, a scarce and limited cognitive resource.This research is divided in four chapters. The first chapter is a survey of prior theoretical and empirical literature on the controversial debate of the relation between CSR and financial outcomes. We have particularly reviewed potential mechanisms that allow CSP to translate into CFP. Most importantly, we rely on studies claiming that firm visibility is a crucial factor to connect social impact to financial performance. Another argument of great appeal is the stakeholder attention theory as proposed by Madsen and Rodgers (2015) from which our research question draws its full legitimacy. Then, we have connected the literatures on attention, information, decision making and CSR to remake the CSP-CFP puzzle and highlight potential research hypotheses. A more readable view is provided by Figure 1 (later in this document) which integrates and synthesizes key predictors, outcomes, mediators, and moderators of the CSP-CFP relation by focusing on studies related to CSR and firm visibility thereby introducing the role of investor attention. Figure 1 is not an exhaustive conceptualization of all the intervening variables in this relationship but rather meant as a multilevel lens and guiding framework to which other variables can be added in the future. However, despite all the advancements in assessing the returns on CSR investments, this debate remains unsettled and has yielded conflicting results. Thus, we conducted three empirical essays on the relation between CSP and financial performance and particularly provide new and unique evidence on the role of investor attention to shape this controversial empirical issue. Therefore, in the first essay, we conduct a multi-country event study and investigate the impact of environmental, social and governance (ESG) news headlines on the shareholder wealth. We find that investors do not value positive ESG news headlines but negatively react to negative ESG news headlines. This result is consistent with the idea that social responsibility and irresponsibility are not the two sides of the same coin. Furthermore, evidence reveals that shareholders only react to negative corporate governance related headlines. This suggests that investors may be especially prone to attend to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives that directly impact their own interests as previously suggested by T. M. Jones et al. (2007). Most importantly, investor attention was found to shape the punishment and reward of CSP, after controlling for the additional role of firm's internal moderators such as firm size and advertising expenditure. [...].