The Motivation and Strategic Value behind Csr Investment and Firm Value

This project considers the motivation and strategic value behind CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) investment and more specifically whether a firm voluntarily engages in CSR investment and whether a firm strategically aligns its CSR investment with its long-term development. We study how both factors and their interactions affects the connection between CSR investment and the firm’s value. This project will be the first large-scale study to empirically test the concept of the virtue matrix proposed by Martin (2002). We will study CSR investments in the Taiwan market and assume that Taiwanese firms that voluntarily publish CSR reports are more likely to be frontier firms based on the virtue matrix. We further utilize information from the materiality matrix in CSR reports to identify whether a firm is more likely to be a strategic frontier or a structural frontier. The strategic frontier variables constructed in this study will be complementary to the existing coverage on CSR or ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) in the major databases, especially in Taiwan. This project should enrich the CSR or ESG studies in Taiwan by providing a novel measure in the stakeholder/shareholder alignment. The procedure can even be applied to a global sample given that the majority of CSR reports follow GRI Standards.