Essays on Corporate Social/Environmental Responsibility and Investment Efficiency

  • Yadong Wang

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

This thesis primarily comprises four main essays: the first is a systematic literature review, and the remaining three are empirical analysis essays. The first essay aims to provide a comprehensive review and summarize the relationships among corporate social responsibility, information asymmetry, and investment efficiency at the theoretical framework level as well as at the empirical research level. The second essay aims to develop a new measurement to quantify the information and activities related to corporate environmental responsibility disclosed by enterprises, and then explore the relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and investment efficiency. The third essay aims to explore the transmission mechanism of information asymmetry between corporate environmental responsibility and investment efficiency. The fourth essay aims to explore the moderating effect of government connected financial supervisionon CER and IA. Each one contributes in its own way to the existing research on corporate environmental responsibility, information asymmetry, and corporate investment efficiency. Initially, review synthesized the most commonly used theoretical frameworks for constructing the relationships between corporate social responsibility, information asymmetry, and investment efficiency, as well as summarized all empirical analysis results. Most theoretical and empirical findings suggest that corporate social responsibility can mitigate information asymmetry, thereby enhance investment efficiency. The systematic review part also provide future research suggestion. Subsequently, employing empirical analysis methods on data from Chinese listed companies from 2012 to 2021, this study examined the relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and investment efficiency. A new corporate environmental responsibility content analysis method was developed for a more refined investigation. The empirical results indicate that corporate environmental responsibility reduces investment inefficiency, and these findings are robust. Further analysis, introducing information asymmetry as a mediating variable, revealed that corporate environmental responsibility weakens investment inefficiency through the mechanism of reducing information asymmetry, with the results remaining robust after a series of robustness tests. Additionally, this study also investigated the moderating role of specific government-embedded financial regulation on the relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and information asymmetry. The results show that government-embedded financial regulation enhances the impact of corporate environmental responsibility in weakening information asymmetry, thus inferring a further reduction in investment inefficiency, with the findings remaining robust after series robustness testing.
Date of Award2 May 2024
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • University of Portsmouth
SupervisorKhaldoon Albitar (Supervisor) & Imad Chbib (Supervisor)

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