Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Firm Value: International Evidence on the Role of CSR Assurance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT A growing number of companies around the world have started publishing corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. However, the sustainability literature remains inconclusive as to whether CSR assurance enhances the credibility of these reports, improves stakeholder trust, and ultimately boosts firm value. Analyzing a global sample of 39,776 firm‐year observations from 2002 to 2019, we present robust evidence that CSR assurance positively influences investors' valuation of CSR efforts. Furthermore, auditor‐provided CSR assurance is found to have a greater impact on CSR valuation in countries where institutions are more conducive to opaque financial reporting. Our analysis further reveals that improved financial performance and better financial reporting quality are the main mechanisms behind this effect. Finally, the impact of CSR assurance is found to be more significant in countries with weaker legal institutions and CSR norms.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".