Does it Pay Off to Compete on Social Purpose?

We develop a novel metric of corporate social responsibility (CSR) rivalry to capture the environmental sustainability engagements of a firm relative to its “green” and “toxic” peers. We document that our measure has superior predictive power about firms’ future pollution levels when compared to alternative unitary CSR scores. Firms with superior relative CSR performance exhibit higher sales growth, profitability, corporate valuation, and future stock returns. Our results suggest that firms compete for CSR ratings and that relative – in addition to unitary – CSR metrics are linked to financial performance