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媒體聲譽對企業社會責任得獎企業其股市表現與財務績效之影響
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‘reputation effect’ because firms with a good reputation are regarded as being ‘better’
firms; and thirdly, through the ‘signaling effect’ since a low evaluation of a firm’s
reputation provides useful information to potential investors.
Thus, firms appear to be provided with strong motivation to manage their relationship
with the media, or indeed, to carefully select the timing of the release of either good or
bad news (Kothari, Shu, and Wysocki, 2009; Lu, Su, and Huang, 2011). We therefore set
out in this study to examine whether firms are more strongly motivated to use the
‘reputation effect’, that is, whether they will choose to release only positive news during
CSR award announcement periods.
Our research objectives are to determine: (i) whether CSR winners have better
financial performance and stock market performance than their non-CSR counterparts; (ii)
whether firms actively attempt to manipulate their media reputation around CSR award
announcement periods; and (iii) whether media coverage can actually create a superior
reputation for CSR winners around periods of CSR award announcements, thereby
directly impacting their financial and stock market performance.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. A review of the related literature
and the development of our hypotheses are presented in Section 2, followed in Section 3
by a summary of our methodology, including descriptions of the data, variable
construction, the proxies used for media reputation, stock market performance and the
regression models adopted for our analyses. Section 4 presents and discusses the empirical
results. Finally, the conclusions drawn from this study are presented in Section 5.
2. Literature Review
It is argued in some studies that the performance of firms in CSR activities may
promote the reputation of such firms leading to increased profitability; thus, from a
strategic management standpoint, the focus on corporate reputation is increased, since it
may be seen as an intangible asset leading to enhanced competitive advantage.
6
Based upon the analysis of the ‘social impact’ hypothesis with additional
consideration of ‘stakeholder’ theory, Preston and O’Bannon (1997) found that corporate
social performance was favorable to financial performance. They noted that by focusing
6 Examples include Dierickx and Cool (1989), Barney (1991), Brammer and Pavelin (2004), and
Dowling (2006).