Corporate social responsibility intensity: Shareholders' value adding or destroying?

This paper examines whether an intensification of corporate social responsibility activities adds or destroys firms' value in Nigeria. Fixed effect regression analytic tool was used to analyze the data from a sample of 56 listed firms on Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) between 2009 and 2018. We followed environmental, social and economic responsibility activities rating based on Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) disclosure guidelines and Korean Economic Justice Institutes (KEJI) social responsibility efficient interpolation rating formula in the measure of firms' social responsibility. The study found that firms that engage in intensive social responsibility yielded positive and insignificant effect on firms' stock value. This implied that an aggressive social responsibility is not the best approach as it possesses the potential to destroy shareholders' value. On the other hand, we found evidence that medium social responsibility model significantly affected firms' financial performance (coefficient = 0.165; p-value >0.05), which suggests that the best social responsibility strategy that significantly increases shareholders' value is the middle course model. A further test showed that generally environmental, social and economic responsibility activities of firms significantly add to firms' market value (Coefficients = 0.028; 0.216; 0.037; p-values<0.05). However, the degree of the effect is contingent on the intensity of the activities and governance structures. Governance structure and board diversity explained firms' efficient CSR strategy that promotes middle course strategies while CSR aggressiveness is explained by unitary model of board leadership. Thus, implementation within an industry average performance adds significantly to investors' value provided that there is effective corporate governance structure.