Corporate Governance Code Revisions, Corporate Social Performance and Firm Value: International Evidence

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of corporate governance code revisions on corporate social performance, and its’ moderating effect on the relationship between corporate social performance and firm value. This study applies the two-stage Heckman sample selection bias approach to tackle endogeneity issues. The sample includes public listed firms from 35 countries that have released their national codes of corporate governance from 2007-2014. Prior to the analysis, we read through the national codes of corporate governance, and find that a majority of the recently revised codes provide new recommendations related to corporate social responsibility. Based on the regression results, we find that progressive corporate governance code revisions are positively related to corporate social performance. In addition, the progressive revisions positively moderate the relationship between corporate social performance and firm value, which is shown in those firms having above-median positive correlation between their corporate governance score and the code revisions. The overall results are robust to industry-adjusted measure of corporate social performance. Furthermore, we find that firm age is important in explaining the moderating effect of corporate governance code revisions.