An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Corporate Governance On Corporate Social Responsibility

In recent years, Corporate Social Responsibility (CRS) has received aconsiderable amount of attention from the research community, as pointed out by theresearchers from China in domestic BBS at the end of February,2012. On one hand,Corporate Social Responsibility affects the sustainable development of theenterprises themselves; on the other hand, it determines the level of internationalcompetitiveness of Chinese corporates. At present the scarcity of socialresponsibility of enterprises is very common. A lot of enterprises are still pursuingmaximum profit regardless of the social responsibility. However, many problems dueto the lack of social responsibility are becoming more and more serious. Therefore, itis urgent and necessary to face them and try our best to resolve them.Based on the stakeholder theory, this paper studies the effects of corporategovernance on Corporate Social Responsibility. The paper starts from an overviewof theoretical frameworks for Corporate Social Responsibility theory, the CorporateGovernance theory and stakeholder theory. Then it crests the index of CorporateSocial Responsibility. Finally the research surveys the empirical test and conducts acomprehensive analysis.3700listed companies in2010~2012are selected as samples in this research.We study the impacts of corporate governance on Corporate Social Responsibilityseparately from the internal governance mechanisms and external governancemechanisms. Results show that Corporate Social Responsibility performance isgenerally significantly affected by corporate governance. The research suggests thatCorporate Social Responsibility performance is significantly negatively related toownership concentration, leverage. and the ration of sales cost, and positively relatedto the number of the general meeting of shareholders. Corporate SocialResponsibility performance is not related to senior management shareholding andstaff shareholding.To conclude the present research, the author points out that, in order toencourage enterprises to actively fulfill their social responsibilities, it is necessary toestablish a “joint participation” pattern of corporate governance mechanism,focusing on the participation of creditors in corporate governance. Meanwhile it isequally important to improve the plans for employees to hold stocks and giveemployees more participatory governance rights.