Study On The Relationship Between Regulatory Capture And Coporate Social Responsibility

The fulfilling of corporate social responsibilities has been gradually changing firms' business mode.However,corporate social responsibility projects of most firms in China have been stayed in the level of charity and donation,and lack of continuous effectiveness.Some type of corporate social responsibility such as “Floating green” and “Reciprocal” has become objects of public denunciation.Corporate social responsibility plays the role of “political capital contribution”,“reciprocal responsibilities”,and “public showdown”,it was even the outcome of a conspiration by both the corporate and the government.The multiple roles of CSR are the outcome of the mutual resource dependence on each other by the enterprise and the government.Based on this background,this paper discusses the ways of corporates' capturing of government from the perspective of government capture under the consideration of the interests of local governments and the governments heterogeneity.The analysis goes in the path of “mutual resource dependence of enterprise and the government”,“game theory”,“regulation capture”,“regulation collusion” and corporate social responsibility.We construct a theoretical model to illustrate the capturing process of government by the corporation in process of CSR regulation set up and execution.And we further discuss the influence mechanism of firm's influential power on CSR.The discussion on the special social responsibility of various industries,could advance the research of CSR evaluation into industry characteristics;The research on the state capture could be extended to the micro-level of enterprises,forming new complex of study on government capture theory and CSR;It could form a new theory synthesis of regulation capture and corporate social responsibility.Our conclusions have practical significance on strengthening government governance,promoting enterprises to fulfil their social responsibility,and enhancing the competitiveness of enterprises.In chapter two,we defined the connotation,extension and dimension of CSR and regulation capture.Then,we clarified the conditions and the ways of the capture of government by firms.From the influence domain,we divide the corporate influence of regulation capture into economical influential power,political influential power and industry influential power.In chapter three.We measured and analyzed the economical influential power,political influential power and industry influential power of regulation capture by listed firms,in order to describe the degree and type of regulation capature.We find that Companies can capture the government by means of economical capability such as economic scale,employment,and tax,and they can also influence the enforcement and supervision of government policies through improper political behavior and political connection.And on the means of industry influence,more and more firms realized that getting involved in drafting industry standard would have the most direct and the deepest influence on industry policy and competitive environment,thus they engage more in authoritative industry associations.Then,based on the definition of Carroll's social responsibility,and combined with the various characteristics of industries in China,we build the social responsibility evaluation database of listed companies in China,using content analysis method.The study finds out that the social responsibility performance of listed companies in China has been increasing year by year,but the difference between the performance of social responsibility in different industries has gradually been widened.It means that the good companies are getting better,otherwise,the bad companies are getting worse.Listed companies do well in the shareholder responsibility,government and public responsibility and employee responsibility,however,they do poor in consumer responsibility,environmental responsibility and community responsibility.Based on the social responsibility and regulation capature database of listed companies,we analyzed the relationship between the economic influence and the corporate social responsibility,political influence and corporate social responsibility,the industry influence and the corporate social responsibility,respectively,controlling the influence of self-financing capacity,government capacity,regional economic development and corporate characters.The research is as follows:In chapter four,we use the panel threshold model to categorize the government's behavior and explore the relationship between economic influence and corporate social responsibility.The results show that corporates' influence on regional economic development has diminishing marginal effect on CSR.However,the corporate economic impact on the regional employment was only significantly negative related to the corporate social responsibility in the collusion government,it is not significantly positive correlated with CSR in the market-leading government and predatory government.Whatever government's behavior,the corporate's influence on the local government's self-financing capacity is an important factor for the government to take into consideration.And the influence mentioned above have negative correlation with CSR.The article further explains the motivation of CSR behavior in different types of government.In chapter five,we first categorize political influence of firms into two kinds,such as “explicit political connection” and “obscure political connection”.Secondly,we explore the relationship between different types of political connection and CSR behavior choice based on the difference of political influence.And we study the motives of CSR in different political connection type in different ownership structure.We find out that improper political interaction would significantly reduce the government's regulation intensity of corporate social responsibility,thus it could reduce the degree of corporate social responsibility.However,with the improvement of the control level of state-owned enterprises,the negative effects of improper political interaction and government official connection on CSR were gradually reduced.For non-state-owned enterprises,the political connection with the representatives of National People's Congress and the Chinese people's political consultative conference can promote the enterprises to do well.Finally,the multi-dimensional empirical results reveal that there is the phenomenon of strategic choice in the relationship between different political influence type and CSR.In chapter six,we constructed the industry influence index to depict the influence of industry association and industry standard influence on corporate social responsibility,according to the industry association level.The empirical results show that participating in an authoritative industry association only can improve the degree of social responsibility,and it also shows that the times that firms participate in drafting industry standard have positive relation with CSR.Also,the general industry association index is positively correlation with corporate social performance.We explain this phenomenon from the perspective of enterprise competitive advantage and the industry association of "the duality of official and people".Secondly,we find that it is an important way for private enterprises to obtain industry dominant resources by taking part in industry association and making industry standard.So,the private enterprises would do well in corporate social responsibility.Finally,the empirical result reveals that each dimension of corporate social responsibility is also the result of the phenomenon of strategic choice,by various corporate industry influence.According to the above mentioned empirical results,we have the specific proposal includes the following: The social responsibility strategic coordination with central and local government,cross-regional and green official assessment mechanism synergy,the coordination of soft regulation and hard law,construction of social responsibility intermediary organizations,the industry association leading the disclosure guidelines of the corporate social responsibility information,and industry associations and professional research institutes guiding corporate strategies to do their social responsibilities.