Research On The Economic Consequences Of Impression Management In CSR

Since the implementation of reform and opening up,economic construction has been the focus of development in our country.Under the psychological drive of “GDP worship”,some enterprises have neglected their social responsibilities in pursuit of maximizing profits,thus spawning more and more social responsibility issues such as ecological and environmental issues,product safety issues,food safety issues,production safety issues,and employee rights issues,so the outside world pays more and more attention to corporate social responsibility.Due to China's specific institutional background and market competition environment,companies have both motivation and space to perform impression management on social responsibility reports.This article aims to explore the economic consequences of corporate social responsibility report impression management behavior.It conducts research from the perspective of audit fees and financing costs and uses accounting conservatism as a regulatory variable to investigate the regulatory role of accounting conservatism.The article selected the Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies that released the social responsibility report from 2008 to 2017 as the research object.Through theoretical derivation and empirical analysis,we concluded these three points:(1)The social responsibility report impression management has a significant positive correlation effect on audit fees and has a significant negative correlation effect on financing costs;(2)The corporate accounting conservatism can not only suppress the positive effect of impression management on audit fees,but also suppress its negative effect on financing costs;(3)In different sub-samples,whether it is the impact of social responsibility report impression management or the adjustment effect of accounting conservatism,state-owned enterprises are more obvious than non-state-owned enterprises,and non-environmentally sensitive enterprises are more obvious than environmentally sensitive enterprises.The researches in this article have certain theoretical and practical significances.In terms of theoretical significance,this article enriches the theoretical research on impression management of social responsibility reports and provides new research perspectives and directions for subsequent scholars.In terms of practical significance,it has a certain enlightening effect on the government and enterprises.We hope that government can enhance the supervision of corporate social responsibility reports,and also hope enterprises can regulate their compilation mechanism of social responsibility reports and improve their own accounting conservatism.