CSR reporting, assurance, and firm value and risk: The moderating effects of CSR committees and executive compensation

Abstract

This study focuses on the value-generating and risk-reducing function of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, assurance, and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) adoption by considering the moderating effects of CSR committees and executive CSR compensation. We retrieved an international dataset of 58,105 firm-year observations from the Thomson Reuters Eikon database over a long period of 16 years between 2004 and 2019. We find that while CSR reporting and external assurance are positively associated with firm value and industry-adjusted firm value, they are negatively associated with firm value volatility (i.e., risk). However, even though following GRI guidelines is not associated with firm value or industry-adjusted firm value, it is negatively associated with firm risk. Moderation analysis reveals that while CSR committees help strengthen the relationship between CSR reporting and external assurance and firm value, they fail to moderate the relation between GRI framework adoption and firm value. Furthermore, there are no significant results on the moderating effect of executive CSR compensation on firm value in any of the model configurations. However, further tests show that executive CSR compensation has a positive moderating effect between CSR reporting and assurance and accounting performance. Robustness tests confirm that the findings are largely robust to alternative sampling, methodology, and additional control variables.