Institutional investment and corporate social performance: aggregated time-Series evidence from an emerging economy

ABSTRACT

In this study, we examined the hypothesis that higher corporate social performance results in higher institutional investment for firms in emerging economies like Bangladesh. Aggregated data of eight years with three-point data were examined by using time-series regression analysis, supplemented by data validity and robustness check, to verify the relationship. We find a positive, insignificant but gradually improving relationship between institutional investment and corporate social performance. Our findings concluded that policy-led measures might better work for emerging economies in ensuring social responsibility initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporate social responsibility
• corporate social performance
• corporate financial performance
• institutional investment
• Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE)
• Bangladesh

Disclosure statement

There is no known conflicting interests or issues reported in this paper.

Notes

1 The historical data shows that in the U.S. 90% of the total investment were made by the retail investors during 1950s, whereas this proportion has come down to only 30%–35% in recent time (Evans 2009).

2 Information related to CSR gives proxy for ‘unobservable attributes’ of a firm. For example, amount of both explicit (monetary) and implicit (management time and effort) costs on CSR activities reflect higher-capability of a firm (Su et al. 2014).