The Empirical Research Of The Relationship Between Board Characteristic And The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Our study examines the relationship between board characteristic and the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).This paper conducts an empirical research on the relationship between board characteristic and CSR based on the analysis of theoretical issues, including the evolution of CSR.Our study consists of three main parts, which are theoretical analysis, theoretical analyses and hypothesis, empirical studies. The study starts from an overview of theoretical issues, including CSR theory, Stakeholders theory, Principal-agent theory, Board governance theory, and analyses the function mechanism of CSR and board characteristic; then creats the index of CSR(emplyees,stakeholders,state); finally conductes an empirical research on the relationship between board characteristic and CSR.This paper selectes the listed companies in Shanghai Stock Exchange spanning from 2007 to 2008 as research sample, then conductes an empirical research on the relationship between board characteristic and CSR. We creat the index of CSR from three points:employees, shareholders and state, use board size, proportion of independent directors, board leadership, board salary and board meetings as independent variables. The result indicates that the board characteristic affects the CSR. We also find that, proportion of independent directors is significantly related with CSR (shareholders), board is significantly related with CSR (employees), board leadership is significantly related with CSR (state), board salary is significantly related with CSR, and there is no relationship between board meetings with CSR. Results show that, different aspects of board characteristic are significantly related with CSR. The results indicate that the board systems of listed companies is still imperfect, more efforts should be done to protect shareholders' rights and interests.According to the above conclusions, this paper promotes many suggestions to improve further proposals such as:improve and perfect the system of independent directors, improve the duality, standard the board size and salary and other suggestions. Our study has limited empirical research based on predecessor's foundation, and has some deficiencies. The index of CSR in our study is narrow, and it is not able to represent listed companies'CSR; this paper conducts empirical research mainly from the board characteristic, without consideration of influences from other aspects of corporate governance; this paper selectes the listed companies in Shanghai Stock Exchange spanning from 2007 to 2008 as research sample, and the conclusions need to be examined in future.