The Relationship between Corporate Social Responsibilities and Financial Reporting Quality: Focusing on Distribution & Service Companies

초록

Purpose - This paper examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility and financial reporting quality. Corporate social responsibility is a way for firms to take responsibility for the social and environmental impacts of their business operations. Corporate social responsibility is a broad concept that can take various forms depending on the firm and industry. Through corporate social responsibility programs, firms can benefit society. At the same time, firms improve their reputations by increasing engagement in corporate social responsibility activities. However, corporate social responsibility activities are not directly related to profitability, especially for distribution firms. Research design, data, and methodology - 229 distribution & service firm-years between 2011 and 2016 are used for the main analysis. In Korea, Korean Economic Justice Institute evaluates the ethical performance of Korean firms, and the institute annually discloses the scores of top firms. This study uses the KEJI Index scores to measure firm-level corporate social responsibility activities. Discretionary accruals are used as a proxy for financial reporting quality. Discretionary accruals can be used opportunistically, and thus distort the information in earnings. We extract financial data from the KIS Value database. Results - We find that distribution & service firms' engagement in corporate social responsibilities is positively related to their financial reporting quality. First, there is a negative correlation between implementation of corporate social responsibility activities and discretionary accruals. In addition, we find that the coefficient of CSR is significantly negative, supporting our prediction. The result is significant at the 1% level. Conclusions - We examine the relationship between corporate social responsibility activities of distribution firms and their financial reporting quality while most prior studies examine the engagement in corporate social responsibility activities of manufacturing firms. The results of this study show that distribution & service firms engaging in corporate social responsibility activities are likely to maintain high-quality financial reporting. © 2018, Korea Distribution Science Association (KODISA).

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