| The study of Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR) rises in Western countries. The development of the capitalist market economy brought a series of social problems such as disregarding business ethics, ignoring labor rights and environmental pollution. In this context, western society launched a vigorous campaign of social responsibility since the1980s. In theoretical circles, scholars combined Stakeholder Theory with CSR Theory and they hold the idea that company should also meet the obligations of the staff, environment, suppliers, consumers and other stakeholders while they are earning a profit for the stockholder.The study of CSR in China lags far behind western countries. After the reform and opening up, China’s economy has made leaps and bounds, but there is also a lot of social problems behind it. At one hand, the public incidents such as Foxconn employees committing suicide and the Melamine appeared in the milk reflect the weakness that our enterprise didn’t pay much attention to the staff and the consumers’ rights, at the other hand, China updates economic development philosophy after joining the WTO. Government and regulatory agencies strengthen the education and guidance of CSR, emphasizing China should establish a comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable development concept. In this background, some listed companies actively fulfill their social responsibilities. They donate money after earthquakes and contribute funds to Water Cellar for Mothers.We can see that some companies perform well in CSR, but some didn’t. So the public concern about the social responsibility of listed companies has been continuously improved because of this fact. Therefore, the disclosure of CSR information become more and more important. The stock exchange promulgated guidance to encourage listed companies to publish CSR report.Based on the above background, this paper try to find that whether CSR report can effectively transmit information and the CSR information can cause the market reaction or not. Existing studies about this topic have not reached a consensus. Based on Social Responsibility Theory, Stakeholder Theory and Efficient Market Hypothesis, this paper proposed three hypotheses and selects manufacturing-listed companies which publish CSR report in2011and examine the market reaction of CSR information and the influencing factors of it. This paper use event study to calculate the cumulative abnormal return(CAR) during the event window, which is the measurement of market reaction. Comparative analysis and multiple regression method are applied to test hypotheses.Empirical results indicate that the CSR report can cause market reaction. It is also shows that the report can transmit CSR information to investors, but this conclusion applies only to consumer-oriented manufacturing industries, the better listed companies perform in CSR, the better market assessment is. Besides, as the CSR report shows listed companies’ social performance for different stakeholders, the CSP for consumers and suppliers,environment,government and public is better, the market assessment is better. But the CSP for other stakeholders has no significant correlation with the market reaction during the event window.It is demonstrated that market one-sided focus on the CSR information of manufacturing industries and there is a significant difference between industries. On the above analysis, this paper gives three suggestions. Firstly, it is important to strengthen public opinion guidance and enhance awareness of social responsibility. Secondly, framework and content of social responsibility information disclosure should be standardized. The last one is that practitioners can cautiously introduce CSR report audit mechanism to improve the usefulness and reliability of CSR information, learning from the financial report audit system.With some limitations of ability and time, this paper has some shortage in sample selection, measurement of variable. And some of these limitations can be improved in the future study. |
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