An Experimental Analysis the Relationship between CSR and Corporate Performance in Tehran Stock Exchange

We commonly expect, on one side, that profitable corporations have stronger incentives to reveal information on the social performance in order to improve their publicity; on the other hand, companies may face the fear of rising costs due to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. With increasing concerns of CSR, it is timely to investigate the relationship between the disclosure of corporate social responsibility and the financial performance. In this paper with the above study objective, we use Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) reports of sample companies, collect evidences by applying the method of structured content analysis of the cases and attempt to identify this relationship. This paper is an attempt to explore the relationship of CSR and firms’ financial performance in Tehran Stock Exchange firms. Based on stakeholder theory and mainly on the theory of good management , we try to find out if an improvement in CSR actions results in higher stock returns. Our Experimental analysis will test whether there is an impact of CSR performance on stock returns, using voluntary disclosures, based on a sample of TSE listed companies. The findings show that there is a positive correlation among stock returns and CSR performance in TSE companies. In operational level, these results aim at persuading managers to implement CSR actions in a greater extent in order to enhance firm market efficiency.

Keywords:

Corporate Social Responsibility , Corporate Performance , Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) , Stock Returns , Stakeholders , Reporting , Tehran Stock Exchange