The Relationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Financial Performance: A Moderating Effect of Economic Policy Uncertainty

Abstract

Within recent decades, researches on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been receiving more attention over the world. The existing literature on CSR is very diverse, both in evaluating the performance of CSR activities as well as and the relationship between CSR disclosure and firms’ outcome. This paper extends the literature of the latter case, that is, not only it aims to purely examine the relationship between CSR disclosure activities and corporate financial performance (CFP), but also consider this nexus under economic policy uncertainty (EPU) context. Our primary data is collected from more than 500 listed companies in the Vietnamese stock market from 2013 through 2017, while secondary data (CSR and EPU) are self-calculated under serial criteria. Our results support the hypothesis that the more companies intensively disclose CSR, the higher financial performance (both ROA and Tobin’s Q) they could obtain. More interestingly, we find that while EPU seems to weakly moderate the relationship between CSR disclosure and “internal financial performance” (ROA), it will significantly diminish the effect of CSR toward “external financial performance” (Tobin’s Q). The research shed light on an approach to measure CSR disclosure indexes for the emerging market as in Vietnam. Our findings encourage the firm’s managers to pay more attention to CSR disclosure activities due to the positive benefit that their firm could obtain and suggest policymakers to maintain a stable economic background for a sustainable market.