사회적 책임 활동과 기업가치 간의 관계에 대한 국제비교: 한국과 중국시장을 배경으로

With the drive of economic transition, corporate social responsibility has increasingly became the issue of global concern. The theory and practice of corporate social responsibility comprehensively and in-depth has important theoretical and practical significance in emerging markets. Therefore, many recent domestic researches focused on the relationship between corporate social responsibility activities and firm value; however, the comparative studies on social responsibility are rare, except some case studies for the Korean companies operating in China. In this study, we compared the corporate social performances between South Korean and Chinese companies. The Chinese government plays a leading role in establishing the corporate social responsibility practices of the Chinese companies. Because corporate social responsibility regulations in Korea are weaker than those in China, the corporate social responsibility activities of Korean companies are more voluntary than those of Chinese companies. We conjectured that the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility is influenced by the level of regulation. If the driving force of corporate social responsibility is one stakeholder(the government), a company’s corporate social responsibility activities may focus on satisfying the sole stakeholder; therefore, the company may have a limitation in fulfilling the needs of other key stakeholders. Instead, if there are no such regulations, a company may focus on firm-specific key stakeholders which are critical for the company success. By using corporate social responsibility indexes of Korea and China from 2011 to 2013, we compared the corporate social performance(CSP)-corporate financial performance(CFP) relationships between the two markets to check whether corporate social responsibility activities affect firm value differently. The empirical findings are as follows. First, consistent with previous studies, the effects of corporate social performances(CSP) on the next year’s firm value(t+1) are significantly positive in both countries. This result confirms the flow of a large number of previous studies which argue that corporate social responsibility has a positive impact on firm value. Second, the positive effects continue to the second year(t+2), which implies that the effects of corporate social responsibility remain for longer periods. The corporate social responsibility creates intangible assets for long-term comparative advantage, furthermore, it provides the basis to managers to recognize the corporative social responsibility as the investment rather than the cost. Third, we found that the Korean companies’ voluntary CSR activities which reflect the needs of various firm-specific stakeholders affect firm value more strongly than that of China which reflect the initiative of national policy. The results are robust after considering the industry effects on corporate social responsibility, the comparability issue, or the potential endogeneity problem. We believe that this research is one of the rare efforts for the comparative CSR studies in Korea, especially of the CSP-CFP relationship between Korea and China. Moreover, we try to analyze the influence of CSP for longer effects instead of testing just to the most adjacent period. However, our analysis focused on the two markets, Korean and China, which may limit the generalization of our conclusions. In addition, because our data is limited to the firms included in the CSR indexes, potential selection bias may affect our results. Detailed analysis of the effects of social responsibility activities based on the differences in regulation, institution, culture, and more in-depth study using different variables other than indexes may need to be implemented in future researches.