Corporate social responsibility as an insurance-like asset: The new evidence from firm-specific product market threats
研究发现企业社会责任能显著降低企业面临的产品市场威胁，且在缺乏业务架构保护时效果更强，为管理者提供了利用CSR应对竞争风险的新视角。
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has long been recognized as an “insurance-like” asset that protects firms from external risks. In business relationships, CSR serves as a valuable asset that strengthens trust and fosters long-term partnerships with customers, suppliers, and stakeholders. However, there is still limited knowledge about how CSR impacts firm-specific product market threats that are tied to a firm's idiosyncratic competitive space. This type of threat is fundamentally different from the traditional concept of competition, which is typically based on aggregate industry classifications. Therefore, the link between CSR and product market threats genuinely demonstrates its safeguarding nature for firm success. We collect a large sample and employ a series of robust methods to investigate this relationship. Furthermore, we enrich our understanding by examining the moderating effects of firm business architecture variables, including related and unrelated diversification, vertical integration, organizational breadth, geographical diversification, and service intensity. The empirical results show that CSR plays a significant role in reducing product market threats, and this effect is stronger when firms lack protection from their business architectures.