The relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and financial performance. An empirical analysis on a sample of italian listed firms

This paper tries to examine the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and some Corporate Financial Performance (CFP). CSR is measured by an index of corporate social responsibility disclosure while ROA, ROS andROE are used to measure CFP. The CSR disclosure index gives information about the engagement of firm in corporate, CSR, and staff strategy, social, community, and political investment, environment, consumer, and supplier awareness, voluntary reports and certifications. We test our hypothesis on a sample of Italian listed firms, specifically, our sample is composed both by the 64 companies listed on the STAR market and by a sample of control, composed by the 20 listed companies with the higher capitalization, for a total of 84 corporations. We have hand-collected the data from the annual report and any other available document present in the institutional website of each corporation, for the 2012-2013 financial year. We use the Tobit Regression Model, whose analyses were performed using the statistical software SPSS© and Gretl©. The result of this study indicates that we cannot state that there is a positive relationship between CSR and CF.