A comparison of corporate social responsibility engagement in the OECD countries with categorical data

Abstract

This note presents a new method to compare the engagement level of the OECD countries with the corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities when achievements of their companies are described by CSR standards. We introduce the eigenvector procedure developed by Herrero and Villar (2013), applying the analysis of group performance with categorical data. We find that differences in CSR engagement across OECD countries are quite low in the top and the bottom of the eigenvector classification compared with those of the GRI index. However, there are important differences across countries placed in the middle rank of these two classifications.

Keywords:

• corporate social responsibility
• categorical data
• Global Report Initiative
• eigenvector

JEL Classification:

• G30
• C13

Acknowledgement

We thank Angel Soler for his valuable assistance with calculations of eigenvector.

Notes

¹ Charitoudi et al. (2011) show that companies increase their CSR performance in periods of financial downturn when an insecure business environment does not seem to motivate CSR engagements.

² The method assumes that all groups are homogeneous with respect to the relevant characteristics. Herrero et al. (2014) also implement the procedure when the groups’ members are heterogeneous.

Additional information

Funding

C. Peraita is grateful for funding from Research Project ECO2011-23248 (Ministry of the Economy and Competitiveness of Spain).