Product Market Competition, Corporate Social Responsibility And Corporate Value

With the integration of the world economy and market trends, and the increasing corporate knowledge density, the critical resources that can help companies to gain a competitive advantage have expanded from tangible resources to technology, brand, culture and other intangible resources. Since the concept of corporate social responsibility was put forward in the early twentieth century, extensive researches conducted by the academia constantly promote the development of the social responsibility theory. In the new economic situation, the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate value once again become a hot topic. Meanwhile, the product market competition as an important external governance mechanism that can effectively supervise and motivate managers, but also provide an opportunity to get a good reputation for enterprise. Based on this consideration, the corporate behavior may be varies with different competitive environment, even the same social responsibility behavior may has different impact on corporate value. Purely empirical analysis on the total samples not only can not fully explain the differences of corporate social responsibility behaviors, but also will cover the industry differences between social responsibility and corporate value. In China, the existing literature has not yet discussed this issue, so we need to study it with empirical research.Based on the above analysis, this paper will examine the influence of the corporate social responsibility on corporate value, and from the perspective of industry competitive differentiation to discuss the differences in the performance of corporate social responsibility and whether the impact of corporate social responsibility on the corporate value is also different. First of all, the paper collates and summarizes the related literatures, and then proposes hypotheses based on the corporate social responsibility theory, the stakeholder theory, the reputation theory and the theory of industrial organization, and builds test models. Finally, I select non-financial companies that are listed on Shanghai stock exchange as samples to test the hypothesis. Results of this study showed that:(1)in other conditions remain unchanged, the product market competition is negatively correlated with corporate social responsibility;(2) in other conditions remain unchanged, corporate social responsibility can significantly improve the current enterprise value;(3) in other conditions remain unchanged, compared with the enterprises in low competitive industries, the positive impact is more significant on the corporate value of highly competitive industries.