Corporate Social Responsibility,Environmental Uncertainty And Investment Efficiency

As one of the "troika" propelling China’s economic development,investment not only influences the operational state of the country’s overall economy at the macro level,but also directly impacts the survival and further business performance of companies at the micro level.Improving the efficiency of resource allocation and curbing inefficient investment is the key to transforming high-speed development to high-quality development under the new economic normal.As an internal governance mechanism,CSR can alleviate financing constraints,reduce information asymmetry and mitigate agency conflicts,and is expected to have a governance effect on investment efficiency.Investment decisions made by companies in a market environment are inevitably influenced by fluctuations in the external environment,but in recent years,the external environment faced by companies has become more volatile and has increased environmental uncertainty.In view of this,it is of great practical significance to investigate how CSR exerts its governance effect and the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty between the two in the context of the normalization of environmental fluctuations,for achieving economic transformation and upgrading.This article takes all A-share listed companies from 2014 to 2020 as the research object and takes a combination of theoretical and empirical methods.Firstly,it souts out the related literature research on CSR,environmental uncertainty and investment efficiency,secondly,propose the research assumptions of this article,and finally,it builds a model to empirically examine the governance effect of CSR and the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty.The model is further analysed from four different perspectives:the nature of property rights,market competition,long-term CSR and the breakdown of environmental uncertainty.The regression analysis leads to the following conclusions:(1)CSR has a governance effect on investment efficiency and thus increases investment efficiency;(2)environmental uncertainty leads to low investment efficiency;(3)environmental uncertainty weakens the governance effect of CSR;(4)further research reveals that the effect of CSR on improving investment efficiency is more evident in non-state owned enterprises,while the mitigating effect of environmental uncertainty is also pronounced among non-state owned enterprises;the external governance mechanism of market competition and the internal governance mechanism of CSR have a superposition relationship when they jointly affect investment efficiency,and enterprises with insufficient market competitiveness are more likely to be disturbed by external environmental fluctuations and thus make wrong investment decisions resulting in underinvestment;the positive impact of long-term social responsibility on investment efficiency is more significant than that of short-term social responsibility,namely,CSR has a "cumulative effect";compared to environmental richness,environmental dynamics inhibit investment efficiency and weaken the effect of CSR governance to a greater extent.Based on the above findings,this paper provides a reference for enterprises to optimise resource allocation from the perspectives of actively undertaking CSR and maintaining the stability of the external environment.