Summary:
Since 2009, the Securities Regulatory Commission has required more than 260 listed companies in the three categories of the Shanghai Stock Exchange to disclose their social responsibility reports together with their annual reports. However, corporate hypocrisy, political rent-seeking, and misuses of corporate social responsibility frequently occur, and corporate social responsibility has become a tool for managers' self-interest. This paper focuses on the role of corporate social responsibility in resource exchange. Corporate social responsibility can help enterprises strategically obtain key resources, such as funds, and reduce capital constraints. In the context of increasingly fierce financialization, this paper argues that profit-seeking will drive enterprises to allocate more funds to financial assets through corporate social responsibility. This will diversify the resources for the development of the main business, squeeze and compress the funds invested by entities, damage the value of enterprises, and cause harm to China's economy. This paper confirms this hypothesis through empirical research and proves that CSR has the adverse consequence of increasing the degree of enterprise financialization by alleviating the financial constraints on enterprises. This conclusion supplements studies of the adverse economic consequences of corporate social responsibility from the perspective of shareholder value doctrine and provides empirical evidence for countries in transition. Based on panel data of A-share non-financial listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2010 to 2017, this paper empirically tests the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate financialization through a mixed OLS model and PSM-DID model. The main conclusions are as follows. (1) Corporate social responsibility provides a source of funds for financial investment by easing the financial constraints of enterprises, leading to greater enterprise financialization. (2) The effect of corporate social responsibility on financialization only exists in non-state-owned enterprises with weak external supervision and enterprises with low levels of internal governance and equity concentration. Administrative external supervision and the internal supervision of large shareholders can play a governance role in restraining managerial speculation. (3) The financialization of China's enterprises is mainly motivated by the “investment substitution” of profit maximization, rather than the “reservoir”. The main policy recommendations from this paper are as follows. (1) Policymakers should encourage listed companies to improve their corporate social responsibility disclosure. In addition to disclosing relevant non-financial information, they should also disclose important financial information, such as investment decisions, to provide a reference for investors to identify the real motivation of corporate social responsibility. (2) Governments should formulate appropriate policies to prevent enterprises from over-financialization. They should strengthen the supervision of enterprises' investments in financial assets and financial institutions, and should standardize the investment direction of enterprises. In addition, it is important to reduce the operating costs of enterprises and improve operating profit margins by cutting taxes and fees. Governments should also strengthen the flow of capital to industry by revitalizing the high-quality assets of enterprises. The main contributions of this paper are as follows. (1) There are two opposite hypotheses about the impact of corporate social responsibility on corporate value: the shareholder value doctrine and management self-interest doctrine. From the perspective of the shareholder value doctrine, CSR can help enterprises obtain key resources and improve their value. From the perspective of the managerial self-interest doctrine, CSR can easily lead to adverse economic consequences. However, the literature based on shareholder value has largely ignored the potential negative impact of corporate social responsibility. The conclusion of this paper reconciles the two opposing views and provides a new path for explaining the impact of corporate social responsibility on corporate value. (2) Most studies explore the motivation of enterprise financialization under the economic or financial framework without considering the impact of non-financial factors on the allocation of financial assets. This paper avoids these limitations and identifies the motivation of corporate financialization from the unique perspective of corporate social responsibility.
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