기업의 사회적 책임(CSR) 활동과 주가붕괴위험 간의 관계에 관한 연구 : 대리인 문제의 관점에서

There has been a widespread belief that activities that the firms voluntarily make efforts to improve society and the environment can eventually increase corporate value. Therefore, firms have adopted such activities under the name of corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, CSR activities can be used as a tool for opportunistic management to build a positive image, especially where information asymmetry between managers and shareholders is pronounced. Based upon this allegation, we investigate the relationship between CSR activities and stock price crash risk, considering agency problems as a situational factor that can influence the relationships. Furthermore, we examine whether the governance mechanism can affect the relationship between these two at a place with high agency problem as well. Our results show that there is a significantly positive relationship between CSR activities and stock price crash risk for the firms whose agency problems are expected to be high. This implies that CSR activities can be opportunistically used at the firms with high information asymmetry between managers and shareholders. In addition, we find that the positive relationship between CSR activities and stock price crash risk for those firms with high agency problem is mitigated as firms' internal and external monitoring mechanisms are well structured. The results of this study demonstrate that, CSR activities can be used opportunistically by managers when information asymmetry between managers and shareholders is pronounced. In addition, the results also evidence that internal and external governance mechanism mitigates managers' opportunistic usage of CSR activities.