Corporate Characteristics, Earning Management And Corporate Social Responsibility

It has been a trend that companies evaluate and take more and more social responsibility since corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an issue of growing interest and be more prevalent globally in recent years. As the represents of the enterprises in China, listed companies have been increasing its CSR activities by making efforts in encompassing the economic, ethical and discretionary expectations of the society. Specially, we question what factors could influence CSR, whether firms exhibit CSR to satisfy the expectations of various interest parties, or to disguise the less transparent and less reliable financial information, thereby covering up the improper decisions made and rent seeking activities. At the same time, we also question whether the ability of corporate characteristics that could impact CSR would change under different level of earning management. The normative and empirical methods are both used in this dissertation. Based on the related theories of CSR and recent researches, using data of listed companies in Shanghai stock market from2010to2012, this paper studies the effects that corporate characteristics and earning management made on CSR, examines the change of ability that corporate characteristics could impact CSR under different earning management level, and explores the ways to improve and perfect CSR performance. Finally, proposals are put forward from the standpoints of investors and government, in order to provide some references for strengthening CSR performance of listed companies.The dissertation includes five parts.The first part is introduction. Firstly, the paper introduced the background and significance of the research, and then the research methods and framework. Finally, the main context of the research is presented.The second part is literature review. This part sketches the theoretical basis of CSR researches, including the development of the CSR theory, the researches of impacting factors of CSR and studies of relationship between earning management and CSR.The third part introduces the research design, which orderly shows how the three hypotheses are developed, and then the empirical models used, the definition and measurement of CSR and other variables and lastly the source of the data used in the article and the selection of the sample.The fourth part makes up the main body of the empirical examination and analysis. Firstly, it exhibits the descriptive statistics of data used. And then, according to the research hypotheses and empirical models developed before, it studies the relationship between company characteristics, earning management and CSR, examines wether the ability that corporate characteristics could impact CSR would change under different earning management level. Finally, to examine whether our results are robust to alternative measure, it changes the measurement of CSR to provide robustness test.The fifth part is the ending of this dissertation. It summarizes the research results and makes the conclusions, as well as providing proposals from the standpoints of investors, government and standard setters. Further more, it points out the limitations and shortcomings of the study, thereby giving some references for the subsequent CSR researches.