한국 기업의 기업지배구조와 사회공헌활동

This study empirically analyzed if the soundness of corporate governance affects the type of Korean firms' corporate social responsibility(CSR) activities. Previous research on CSR activities has primarily focused on either the impact of CSR activities on firm value or the prerequisites of CSR activities. Especially on the second point, prior research has made predictions on what characteristics lead a firm to perform CSR activities. For example, Barnea and Rubin(2010), Bartkus(2002), and Coffey and Wang(1998) mentioned that internal statkeholders may have impacts on the level of CSR activities. In addition, Oh et al.(2011) found differential impacts of internal stakeholders and external stakeholders on a firm’s CSR activities. Following this research, this study categorized CSR activities into two broad groups and investigated if different groups have different prerequisites. To do this, this study first identified two groups of CSR activities, organizational and voluntary activities. Also this study identified two prerequisites related to firms’ governance structure, which are stockholder right protection scores and information discloser scores. We then tried to find any relationship between the scores of a firm’s governance structure and the firms’ choice of a type of CSR activity. We collected data for firms’ CSR activities from The Federation of Korean Industries Corporate Social Responsibility White Paper during 2009-2012, data for firms’ governance structural soundness scores from the Korea Corporate Governance Service, and data for firms’ financial status from Korea Listed Companies Association. Also we used Korea Standard Industrial Classification Tables to control industry effects. Based on 236 public firms that performed CSR activities during 2009-2012, we found that stockholder rights protection score is associated with organizational CSR activities, while information discloser score is associated with voluntary CSR activities. As a result, we found that different stakeholders have different impacts on a firm’s SCR activities. Stockholders may have more strategic purposes on the firm’s CSR activities which involve organization-basis formal planing processes. On the other hand, when a firm is active to disclose it’s information to outside, voluntary CSR activities could be more important to show that the firms is behaving as a citizen in the society. The implications and suggestions are as follows. First, we used governance structure scores and CSR data to see the relationship between the two. Since governance may have broad impact on a firm’s activities in various ways, it could be interesting to see if other types of activities, such as innovation or globalization, could be affected by governance structure. Second, this study categorized CSR activities into two groups, organizational and voluntary activities, but other types of activities could be found if data is allowed. If so, we can have better picture on how firms to contribute to the society. Third, this study focused on the function of information disclosure in terms of CSR activities. It is suggested that the impact of information closure of the firm could be another interesting research topic.