Corporate Social Responsibility, Earnings Management, and Firm Performance: Evidence from Panel VAR Estimation

Abstract

Previous literature investigates links between corporate social responsibility (CSR), earnings management (EM), and firm performance (FP) but has looked at pair-wise relations (CSR-EM, CSR-FP, and EM-FP) for one-way effects without considering endogeneity among the variables. We examine these relations recognizing endogeneity and possible two-way effects and also consider two additional factors, corporate governance (CG) and management compensation (MC) that may influence the interrelations between firms’ FP, EM and CSR. To examine the complex relationships among these endogenous variables (CSR, EM, PF, CG, and MC) under different eras in management oversight, we divide our complete sample period from 1992 to 2009 into a pre-SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) period (from 1992 to 2001) and a post-SOX period (from 2002 to 2009), and innovatively employ a rigorous panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) approach. We find three main results: (1) CSR had a positive influence on EM in the pre-SOX period but CSR had no impact on EM post-Sox. (2) There is no relation between CSR and FP pre-SOX, but there are bi-directional relations between them during the post-SOX period: a positive influence of CSR on FP and a negative influence of FP on CSR. (3) FP positively affects EM in both pre- and post-SOX periods.