Philanthropy, Csr and Ngos' Activism

Abstract: Firms’ social or environmental reputation is influenced by both Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and philanthropic (or donations) efforts. I develop a model of CSR, in which firms invest in safe production process or not, and on strategic CSR disclosure. In addition, they may invest in philanthropic activities to signal their propensity to be socially responsible, and NGOs may audit and punish information withholding firms. Thus, I explore theoretically and empirically the correlation between CSR and philanthropic records of firms. Indeed, I use the Covalence EthicalQuote dataset that reports CSR as philanthropic records for multinational firms, to estimate the correlation between both types of social and environmental investments.