Research On The Influence Of Investors' Corporate Investigation On Corporate Social Responsibility Performance

In order to achieve sustainable development in the long term,it is of tremendous importance for enterprises to balance the interests of various sorts of stakeholders.Nevertheless,there exist short-sighted enterprises which deem profit as their top priority and act recklessly in the pursuit of profit,violating laws and regulations,polluting the environment,swindling customers,etc.In hence,the interests of their stakeholders and the development in and of themselves are damaged terribly and deeply.During the reform and opening-up of more than four decades,China has witnessed noticeable achievements in social economy and continuous progress in the development of domestic capital market where investors have played an increasingly prominent role.Investors' corporate investigations can provide good opportunities for them to further understand the situation of target enterprises,which is conducive to reducing the degree of information asymmetry between both sides.As the main participants of the investors that conduct corporate investigations,sophisticated institutional investors are motivated and qualified to enhance the corporate governance of the target enterprises.At a moment when the negative phenomena resulting from the deficiency of corporate social responsibility(CSR)still occur occasionally,it is of tremendous practical significance to examine whether investors' corporate investigations are able to be conducive to exerting some positive impacts on supervising the target enterprises in order that they can perform CSR much better and more actively.Based primarily on the data of listed companies of Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2013 to 2017,the innovative objective of this thesis is to probe into the influence of investors' corporate investigations intensity on the CSR performance of target enterprises.It is found that the investors' corporate investigations intensity is positively and significantly related to the CSR performance of target enterprises.In the meantime,the empirical results suggest that investors' corporate investigations intensity is positively and significantly related to the internal control effectiveness of target enterprises as well,which to some degree provides guarantee for them to perform CSR.Extended research indicates that the state-owned nature of the target enterprises is able to promote the positive impact of investors' corporate investigations intensity on the CSR performance,and that compared with target enterprises with higher media attention,the positive impact of investors' corporate investigations intensity on the CSR performance is more pronounced in target enterprises with lower media attention.Besides,the result of text analysis of main effect suggests that,during corporate investigations,there remains a significantly positive correlation between investors' attention on the overall CSR performance as well as four out of five dimensions of it and the corresponding scores,which are the dimension of shareholders,the dimension of employees,the dimension of suppliers,customers and consumers,and the dimension of environment.Last but not least,the result of heterogeneity test based on different categories of institutional investors indicates that the positive impact of sellside institutional investors on the target enterprises' CSR performance is significantly stronger than that of the buyside.From the perspective of CSR,this thesis further enriches the literature relevant to the governance effect of investors' corporate investigations and is of positive significance for enterprises,investors and relevant regulatory departments.Investors' enhancing their professional capabilities continuously,together with enterprises and regulatory departments' further improving relevant mechanism and smoothing communication between investors and enterprises,will promote the improvement of CSR performance at the macro level.