The Effect of Corporate Visibility on Corporate Social Responsibility

Authors

Zhichuan Li, Western UniversityFollow
Taylor Morris, Western University
Brian Young, Wake Forest University

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-5-2019

Volume

11

Issue

13

Journal

Sustainability

First Page

3698

URL with Digital Object Identifier

https://doi.org/10.3390/su11133698

Abstract

Outside of direct ownership, the general public may feel it is an implicit stakeholder of a firm. As the public becomes more vested in a firm’s actions, the firm may be more likely to engage in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. We proxy for the public’s stake in a firm with public visibility. Based on 3,400 unique newspaper publications from 1994 to 2008, we measure visibility for the U.S. S&P 500 firms with the frequency of print articles per year concerning the firm. We find that visibility has a signficant, positive relationship with the CSR rating. Evidence also suggests this relationship may be causal and working in one direction, from visibility to CSR. While the existing literature provides other factors that influence CSR, visibility proves to have the most significant impact when tested alongside those other factors. Visibility also has a mediating effect on the relationship between CSR rating and firm size. CSR rating and firm size relate negatively for the lowest visibility firms and positively for the highest. This paper provides strong evidence that visibility is an important factor to consider for studies on corporate social performance.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Citation of this paper:

Li, Z.F., Young, B., Morris, T. 2019. Corporate Visibility in Print Media and Corporate Social Responsibility. Sustainability 11(13): 369.