慈善捐赠对企业绩效的影响——企业生命周期的调节作用

The Impact of Corporate Philanthropy on Firm Performance:The Moderating Effect of Corporate Life Cycle Stage

慈善捐赠是企业履行社会责任的重要形式之一,能够带来企业绩效的增长。但在企业的全生命周期中,企业慈善捐赠行为对企业绩效的影响尚未获得深入研究。本文以2008—2015年中国上市公司为样本,在企业慈善捐赠和绩效关系中引入生命周期阶段作为调节变量,研究在企业成长、成熟和调整阶段,慈善捐赠对企业绩效的异质性影响及其影响机制。研究发现,慈善捐赠仅在成熟阶段对企业绩效存在积极影响。成长阶段,由于资源约束的存在,企业慈善捐赠存在对投资资源的“挤出效应”,对绩效的积极贡献不足;调整阶段,由于委托代理问题凸显,企业慈善捐赠更多表现为企业的“代理成本”,因此对企业绩效的贡献有限。通过引入企业生命周期理论,本文证实了慈善捐赠对企业绩效的影响因企业所处阶段不同而存在差异。结合资源基础理论和代理理论,本文解释了成长阶段和调整阶段捐赠贡献不足的原因,在一定程度上拓展了现有研究,同时也为企业管理实践提供了参考。

Corporate philanthropy is an important manifestation of corporate social responsibility,and can increase firm performance.However,the impact of corporate philanthropy on firm performance in the whole corporate life cycle has not yet been studied in depth.Employing resource-based theory and panel data between 2008 and 2015 retrieved from CSMAR,this paper investigates how the corporate philanthropy leads to heterogeneous performance at growth,mature and shake-out stages,and explores the influencing mechanism.The results show that corporate philanthropy has greater positive impact on firm performance at mature stage;due to the existence of resource constraints,corporate philanthropy for firms at growth stage has a crowding-out effect on investment resources,thus leading to limited impact on firm performance;due to the agency problem,corporate philanthropy for firms at shake-out stage has limited impact on firm performance.Introducing corporate life-cycle stage in philanthropy-performance relationship,this paper proves that corporate philanthropy has distinctive impact on firm performance at different stages.Integrating resource-based theory and agency theory,the paper explains the reason of insufficient contribution of philanthropy to firm performance at growth stage and shake-out stage.The conclusion of this paper extends the related literature,and also provides managerial suggestions.