Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Financial Performance: A Literature Review

This paper aims to investigate the literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to provide a comprehensive overview of whether CSR would make a difference to organisational financial outcomes. The paper also provides a closer focus on CSR research in Vietnam. Through an extensive analysis of...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nguyen, Tien, Nguyen, Chi Ha Lien
Other Authors: Pham, Phuc Van
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: VNU-HCM Press 2020
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/84704
_version_ 1848764676171628544
author Nguyen, Tien
Nguyen, Chi Ha Lien
author2 Pham, Phuc Van
author_facet Pham, Phuc Van
Nguyen, Tien
Nguyen, Chi Ha Lien
author_sort Nguyen, Tien
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description This paper aims to investigate the literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to provide a comprehensive overview of whether CSR would make a difference to organisational financial outcomes. The paper also provides a closer focus on CSR research in Vietnam. Through an extensive analysis of 86 most recent empirical studies from 2015 to 2020, we found that the contribution of CSR to firm financial performance has received significant support from the literature. Yet the overall findings are still inconsistent, and the majority of evidence is mainly from developed countries. The current literature on CSR and firm performance highlights some important issues, ranging from theoretical background, CSR measures, methodological issues, the need to consider intervening factors in CSR-firm performance relationship, and the need to extend this literature further in developing and emerging countries. The literature on CSR-firm performance research in Vietnam closely resembles these problems. Research in this country domain is still scarce in both quantity and quality, reflecting in a number of issues including the limited number of international publications, the absence of theory-driven research, and the less rigorous research design. Building on these findings, we recommend future research to (i) adopt the multi-theoretical approach for a more extensive view on whether and how CSR contributes to firm performance; (ii) obtain more rigorous methodological approaches to measure a wide range of CSR dimensions and address the issue of endogeneity in CSR-firm performance causal relationship; (iii) open the Pandora box to explore why and through which channels CSR can improve firm financial performance with the presence of situational factors; and (iv) build the literature with more evidence from different country contexts and from developing and emerging countries.
first_indexed 2025-11-14T11:23:08Z
format Journal Article
id curtin-20.500.11937-84704
institution Curtin University Malaysia
institution_category Local University
language English
last_indexed 2025-11-14T11:23:08Z
publishDate 2020
publisher VNU-HCM Press
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling curtin-20.500.11937-847042021-08-11T07:51:27Z Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Financial Performance: A Literature Review Nguyen, Tien Nguyen, Chi Ha Lien Pham, Phuc Van This paper aims to investigate the literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to provide a comprehensive overview of whether CSR would make a difference to organisational financial outcomes. The paper also provides a closer focus on CSR research in Vietnam. Through an extensive analysis of 86 most recent empirical studies from 2015 to 2020, we found that the contribution of CSR to firm financial performance has received significant support from the literature. Yet the overall findings are still inconsistent, and the majority of evidence is mainly from developed countries. The current literature on CSR and firm performance highlights some important issues, ranging from theoretical background, CSR measures, methodological issues, the need to consider intervening factors in CSR-firm performance relationship, and the need to extend this literature further in developing and emerging countries. The literature on CSR-firm performance research in Vietnam closely resembles these problems. Research in this country domain is still scarce in both quantity and quality, reflecting in a number of issues including the limited number of international publications, the absence of theory-driven research, and the less rigorous research design. Building on these findings, we recommend future research to (i) adopt the multi-theoretical approach for a more extensive view on whether and how CSR contributes to firm performance; (ii) obtain more rigorous methodological approaches to measure a wide range of CSR dimensions and address the issue of endogeneity in CSR-firm performance causal relationship; (iii) open the Pandora box to explore why and through which channels CSR can improve firm financial performance with the presence of situational factors; and (iv) build the literature with more evidence from different country contexts and from developing and emerging countries. 2020 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/84704 10.32508/stdjelm.v4i3.579 English http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ VNU-HCM Press fulltext
spellingShingle Nguyen, Tien
Nguyen, Chi Ha Lien
Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Financial Performance: A Literature Review
title Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Financial Performance: A Literature Review
title_full Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Financial Performance: A Literature Review
title_fullStr Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Financial Performance: A Literature Review
title_full_unstemmed Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Financial Performance: A Literature Review
title_short Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Financial Performance: A Literature Review
title_sort corporate social responsibility and firm financial performance: a literature review
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/84704