A Study on Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Performance in Taiwan and China: A Quantile Regression Approach

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of corporate social responsibility activities on corporate performance in Taiwan and China and employs a sample of the top 300 Chinese firms over the period 2009–2011 and 685 non-financial companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) over the period 2008–2010 In view of the inconsistent empirical findings in the literature and the limitations of least squares regressions we adopt a quantile regression method to fill this gap in the literature In this paper we hope to provide a different perspective to that presented in the current literature with regard to the impact of CSR on corporate performance by adopting a quantile regression approach According to the empirical results for all quantiles we find a uniformly significant positive relationship between engagement in CSR activities and firm performance in Taiwan However the results in China show that the sensitivity of a company’s performance to its engagement in CSR activities vary with the quantile location of the firm’s performance level when using gross profit to net sales as a performance measure although this does not occur when using other performance measures However these findings could not be obtained with conditional mean-focused regressions

Date of Award	2014 Jun 26
Original language	English
Supervisor	Hsin-Hong Kang (Supervisor)