Essays on Corporate Social Responsibility and Socially Responsible Investment

Download or read book Essays on Corporate Social Responsibility and Socially Responsible Investment written by Vincent Lapointe and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our thesis examines corporate social responsibility (CSR) and how it is linked to a firm's economic and financial performance, as well as socially responsible investment (SRI). With the current environmental and economic uncertainty, these issues are attracting increasing interest. Our thesis is organized in four chapters. Chapter 1 is a literature review on CSR and SRI. We propose an interdisciplinary review of the academic literature in both economics and management sciences (ethics applied to business, strategy and finance). Chapter 2 is an empirical analysis of the relationship between CSR and a firm's financial performance in terms of cost of capital. We look at the impact of publishing an evaluation of the firm's involvement in CSR on the liquidity of its stocks and the size of its investor base. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 are analyses of the characteristics of SRI portfolios built according to new allocation methodologies. We analyze how risk-based allocations impact the performance of the portfolios of financial products of issuers involved in CSR, and reciprocally, how a universe of investment composed of the financial products of issuers involved in CSR impacts the properties of these alternative allocations.