An Empirical Research On The Effect Of Corporate Governance To Corporate Social Responsibility

In the1920’s,the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility（CSR） was put forward inAmerica.Since then,the western academia has done a lot of research and discussions.They haveachieved fruitful results.With the rapid development of science and technology and theacceleration of the economic globalization,undertaking CSR has become an unstoppableinternational trend.However,in China,research on CSR is still at the primary stage,whether intheory or in practice.Many enterprises do not have a correct understanding of CSR,and theirconsciousness of bearing social responsibility needs to be strengthened.The performance of CSR is influenced by many factors.This paper studies on the effect ofCorporate Governance to CSR based on the stakeholder theory.The paper mainly includes threeparts,which are literature review,CSR evaluation and empirical analysis.Firstly,the researchreviews the theory of CSR and Corporate Governance and the relevant research results aboutthe relationship between the two at home and abroad.Then from the perspective of stakeholdertheory,the evaluation system of CSR is constructed by using stakeholder contribution rateindicator.Finally by selecting Chinese real estate listed companies in Shanghai and ShenzhenA-share markets from2009to2011as research sample,this paper brings forward hypothesisseparately from the aspects of internal governance and external governance,then builds aregression model to give the empirical analysis on the effect of Corporate Governance to CSR.Results show that the overall level of Corporate Social Responsibility in our country is nothigh,accompanied by a great difference at the same time.Through the correlation study,we finddifferent indicators of Corporate Governance have different effects on CSR.Executive pay andasset-liability ratio are significantly positively correlated with CSR,while there is a significantnegative correlation between the proportion of independent directors and CSR.That reflects thatthe level of Corporate Social Responsibility will significantly increase with the rising executivepay and asset-liability ratio.At the same time,it means that the system of independent directorsof listed corporation does not play its role well.So relevant supportive reforms must bepromoted to make sure that the independent directors function effectively andindependently.The other variables are not able to enter the final model because of the weakexplanatory power to CSR.In the end,from the two aspects of internal governance structure andexternal market,the paper puts forward a few suggestions on how to encourage companies toundertake the social responsibility.