Do shareholders punish or reward excessive CSR engagement? Moderating effect of cash flow and firm growth
研究了股东对过度企业社会责任（CSR）的反应，发现最优和过度CSR均提升公司价值，但最优CSR对股东价值相关性更高；现金流正向调节、公司成长负向调节两者与公司价值的关系。
Although extensive past research has studied the connection between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm value, it has rarely discriminated between optimal and excessive CSR. Thus, we addressed this issue by examining whether shareholders punish or reward excessive CSR engagement through the moderating effect of cash flow and firm growth. We applied country–industry–year fixed-effects (FE) regression to a cross-country sample of 43,803 firm-year observations between 2002 and 2019. The findings show that while both optimal and excessive CSR increase firm value, optimal CSR has greater value relevance than excessive CSR for shareholders. However, although cash flow positively moderates the relationship between optimal and excessive CSR and firm value, firm growth negatively moderates this relationship. The findings are robust regarding alternative CSR proxies, industry-adjusted firm value measures, public governance indicators, and endogeneity concerns.