Summary:
Targeted poverty alleviation is a national strategy and an innovative form of poverty alleviation proposed according to China's special national conditions. Enterprises' participation in targeted poverty alleviation can not only give full play to the inherent advantages of industrial poverty alleviation and implement “blood-creating” poverty alleviation, but also obtain a larger platform for creating value. Therefore, the targeted poverty alleviation by corporate is an important part of winning the battle against poverty, and also becomes a new form for corporate to fulfill their social responsibility. Then, does the capital market pay attention to the targeted poverty alleviation actions of listed companies？ Does the participation of corporate in targeted poverty alleviation affect corporate risk？ The research on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate risk has formed two competing views: the risk reduction hypothesis and the risk increase hypothesis. Regarding the hypothesis of increased risk, neoclassical economics believes that corporate social responsibility has deviated from the goal of maximizing shareholder value. Under the condition of limited corporate cash flow, overtaking of social responsibilities will occupy corporate resources, which may result in companies having to reduce strategic investments such as R&D investment and long-term investment, weakening corporate competitiveness, reducing corporate value, and increasing corporate risk. According to principal-agent theory, managers tend to be opportunistic, and their active fulfillment of social responsibilities may be social activities that have nothing to do with the development of enterprises in order to improve their personal reputation and social influence. Wasting the limited resources of an enterprise on social activities unrelated to the creation of shareholder value will weaken the competitiveness of the enterprise and increase its risk. For self-interested motives, managers may use social responsibility tools to divert negative news and cover up the problems in the business performance of enterprises, so that enterprises perform social responsibility only has “tool characteristics” rather than “value-creating characteristics”. Therefore, it is ultimately an empirical question that this study aims to address. In order to answer these questions, this paper downloaded from the CSMAR database the non-financial listed companies that participated in targeted poverty alleviation in China's A-share market in 2016-2018 as a sample to empirically study the impact of targeted poverty alleviation on corporate risk. The empirical research conclusions of this paper mainly include the following points. First, the targeted poverty alleviation action is significantly negatively correlated with the equity market risk. Second, the lower the corporate information transparency, the stronger the effect of targeted poverty alleviation on the risk reduction of the stock market, indicating that the lower the transparency of corporate information, the stronger the “information communication” role of the targeted poverty alleviation actions of enterprises; Third, in regions where the institutional environment is weaker, the targeted poverty alleviation behavior of companies has a stronger effect on reducing equity market risk. This shows that in areas where the institutional environment is relatively weak, the government allocates a greater proportion of economic resources. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: Firstly, this paper studies the impact of corporate social responsibility on corporate risk from the perspective of targeted poverty alleviation, enriching the research scope of corporate social responsibility and corporate risk. Secondly, based on the perspective of equity market risk, this article finds that investors pay attention to the targeted poverty alleviation behavior of enterprises and can identify the strategic significance of targeted poverty alleviation by enterprises. Finally, the conclusions of this article have important policy significance. This article explores the mechanism of the enterprise's targeted poverty alleviation affecting enterprise risk from the perspectives of reputation effect, resource effect and information effect.
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