Marketing spending, firm visibility, and asymmetric stock returns of corporate social responsibility strengths and concerns
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to focus on the unique goal of understanding how marketing spending, a proxy for firm visibility, moderates the effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) strengths and concerns on stock returns in the short and long terms. In contrast to the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, the visibility theory, based on stakeholder awareness and expectations, offers asymmetric predictions on the moderation effects of marketing spending. Design/methodology/approach The predictions are tested based on data from KLD, Compustat and Center for Research in Security Prices from 2001-2010 and panel data based regression models. Findings Two results support the predictions of the visibility theory over those of the RBV. First, strengths are associated with higher stock returns, for low marketing spending firms, and only in the long term. Second, concerns are associated with lower stock returns, for high marketing spending firms, also only in the long term. A profiling analysis indicates that high marketing spending firms have high R&D spending and are more likely to operate in business-to-customer than business-to-business industries. Practical implications The two findings highlight the importance of coordination among chief marketing, sustainability and finance officers investing in CSR and marketing for stock returns, contingent on the firm’s marketing and R&D spending and industry characteristics. Originality/value This paper identifies conditions under which CSR is and is not related to stock returns, by uniquely considering three variables omitted in most past studies: marketing spending, CSR strengths and concerns and short- and long-term stock returns, all in the same study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.057 | 0.075 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".