A note on the interaction between corporate social responsibility and financial performance

This paper studies the interaction between financial and social performance. The research is about the overall social strengths and concerns of firms as well as strengths and concerns with respect to firms' community involvement, employee relations, diversity, environment and product. Using a sample of 289 firms from the US covering the period 1991-2004 and employing two different test methods, namely lagged OLS and Granger causation, there appears to be preliminary evidence that the direction of the 'causation' predominantly runs from financial to social performance. However, the specific interaction patterns tend to vary along the different dimensions. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.