The Impact Of Corporate Social Responsibility On Cross-border Mergers And Acquisitions Performance From The Perspective Of Legitimacy

China has become one of the most influential countries in the global M&A market.How to overcome the liabilities of origin to improve the M&A performance for Chinese enterprises has become an urgent problem under the environment fill with complicated and severe competitions.By summarizing relevant literature,this paper finds that there is a certain relationship between corporate social responsibility and legitimacy.Enterprises must meet the requirements of legitimacy during cross border process,and legitimacy comes from the evaluation of stakeholders.Can enterprises obtain positive evaluation and support from these stakeholders by actively performing social responsibility? Will it have a positive impact on the improvement of cross border M&A performance?This paper selected companied which completed cross border M&A during 2010-2018 as samples to carry out empirical research to testify the relationship between corporate social responsibility and the moderating effect of institutional distance and cultural distance on this relationship.The conclusions are as follows: Firstly,the social responsibility behavior of the acquirer plays a positive role in promoting the performance of cross-border M&A.The better the acquirer’s performance in terms of social responsibility,the greater benefits of cross-border M&A.Secondly,both institutional distance and cultural distance have a negative moderating effect on the positive correlation between CSR and cross-border M&A performance.When the difference in institutional distance or cultural distance between the acquirer and the target is big,the correlation between CSR and cross-border M&A performance is no longer significant.In addition,the robustness of the model is tested by changing the measurement method of crossborder M&A performance,and the results also support the hypothesis of this paper.The results of this paper support the view that CSR can help enterprises gain legitimacy in host countries and promote the improvement of cross border M&A performance.This paper expands the research scope of CSR and provides a new perspective for the research on the improvement of cross border M&A performance of enterprises in emerging economies.