Corporate social responsibility, product market perception, and firm value

We examine whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) is used to signal product quality and whether CSR affects firm value through its positive effect on product market perception. Using a proprietary database, we find that visible CSR, such as environmental and community involvement, positively impacts product market perception, particularly for standardized goods and in competitive industries, and that this impact is more pronounced for product quality attributes. Furthermore, we find that CSR indirectly increases firm value through an improvement in product market perception. We conclude that product market perception is a channel through which CSR creates firm value.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Journal of Corporate Finance

• Publication date

  2020-06-01

• Fields of study

  Business, Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2020.101588
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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