Mitigating crisis impact: The influence of corporate social responsibility on non-financial firms’ financial performance
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the financial performance of firms by analyzing how it affects the relationship between capital structure and financial performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on non-financial publicly listed firms in the USA, UK, Canada, Japan, and Italy from 2018 to 2021. Our findings reveal that during the pandemic short-term debt significantly negatively impacts return on assets (ROA), specifically a decrease of 35%. Additionally, we provide empirical evidence that CSR positively influences financial performance. In particular, the combined CSR scores, as well as environmental and social activities, positively affect ROA, return on equity (ROE), and Tobin’s Q across all analyses. We observe that a high combined score (ESG) mitigates the adverse effects of all types of debt on ROA and ROE. However, the positive impact on Tobin’s Q is more pronounced regarding long-term and total debt by 0.987 % and 0.937%, respectively. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that high environmental, social, and governance activities have a more substantial positive effect on the relationship between total debt and both ROE and Tobin’s Q. Overall, our study suggests that investing in CSR can be a wise strategy for firms, not only helping to alleviate the adverse effects of debt during market downturns but also switch the adverse effect to positive which ultimately enhancing financial performance.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it