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The Relationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Performance (A Case Study from Finland)

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Social Responsibility and Sustainability

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Abstract

The impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on the company’s performance has become an increasingly important issue among investors, companies and company’s management. Despite the fact, that many studies have been conducted on this topic, the relationship between CSR and financial performance is still unclear regarding the causality and different categories of CSR. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to study if corporate social responsibility (CSR) has an impact on financial performance (FP) and to find out, what the nature of the impact is. This study uses correlation and multiple linear regression models in order to examine the relationship between CSR and the financial variables. The sample consists of 30 publicly listed companies in Finland whose financial data and CSR activities during the years 2013–2016 are analyzed. The accounting based model of Return on Assets (ROA) and the market-based model of Earnings per share (EPS) are selected to measure financial performance and CSRHub rates to estimate the corporate social responsibility (CSR). The control variables: capital structure, risk, size and industry were chosen for this research, because of their tendency to have association with the financial performance.

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Correspondence to Mari Kooskora .

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Model Summary ROA

Model

R

R Sq.

Adjusted R Sq.

Std. error of the estimate

Change statistics

Durbin-Watson

R Sq. change

F change

df1

df2

Sig. F change

1

586a

0.343

0.314

4.47353

0.343

11.915

5

114

0.000

2.123

  1. aPredictors: (Constant), IND, RISK, CSR, SIZE, CAPSTRUC

Appendix 2: Anova Table ROA

ANOVAa

Model

 

Sum of squares

df

Mean square

F

Sig.

1

Regression

1192.255

5

238.451

11.915

0.000b

Residual

2281.423

114

20.012

  

Total

3473.678

119

   
  1. aDependent variable: ROA
  2. bPredictors: (Constant), IND, RISK, CSR, SIZE, CAPSTRUC

Appendix 3: Coefficients ROA

 

Unstandardized coefficients

Standardized coefficients

  

95.0% confidence interval for B

Correlations

Model

B

Std. error

Beta

t

Sig.

Lower bound

Upper bound

Zero-order

Partial

Part

1 (Constant)

−10.759

12.972

 

−0.829

0.409

−36.457

14.938

   

CSR

−0.194

0.074

−0.209

−2.643

0.009

−0.340

−0.049

−0.095

−0.240

−0.201

CAPSTRUC

0.465

0.138

0.879

3.380

0.001

0.193

0.738

0.526

0.302

0.257

SIZE

5.327E−9

0.000

0.155

1.975

0.051

0.000

0.000

0.217

0.182

0.150

RISK

0.166

0.123

0.350

1.353

0.179

−0.77

0.409

−0.489

0.126

0.103

IND

6.181E−5

0.000

0.028

0.359

0.720

0.000

0.000

−0.028

0.034

0.027

  1. aDependent variable: ROA

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Kooskora, M., Juottonen, M., Cundiff, K. (2019). The Relationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Performance (A Case Study from Finland). In: Leal Filho, W. (eds) Social Responsibility and Sustainability. World Sustainability Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03562-4_25

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