Socially responsible companies performance: an analysis with financial and accounting ratios

This work has the main aim to analyze the socially responsible companies’ performance, through accounting and financial Liquidity, Debt and Profitability indicators, related to the year of 2005. As socially responsible companies were searched those ones which were on the Business Sustainability Index, the “Índice de Sustentabilidade Empresarial” (ISE), from BOVESPA. The sectors with the major number of companies, from the 29 of non financial listed, were the Paper and Pulp and Steel and Metallurgy. From this point, it was made a comparison of the behavior of the socially responsible companies with the other belonging to their sector, which were listed among the Best and Bigger, “Maiores e Melhores” from the Exame Magazine (2006). The idea is to check if the companies which have adopted “politically” correct practices through social and environmental actions showed a performance, in terms of liquidity, debt and profitability, statistically higher in relation to the market. The results show that, it isn’t observed significant differences in the indexes under analysis between the two companies groups (socially responsible and the market). Key-words: Social Responsibility; Performance; ISE