探究客户集中度与企业社会责任的关系

Exploring the Relationship between Customer Concentration and Corporate Social Responsibility

以往关于客户集中度对公司层面结果影响的研究主要集中在业绩和财务风险方面。企业社会责任作为可持续经营管理的重要问题之一,近年来越来越受到学者们的关注。然而,对企业社会责任前因的研究还远远少于对其结果的研究,也很少有研究从买方–供应商关系的角度来研究是什么决定了企业社会责任投入。客户作为企业的利益相关者之一,在买方–供应商关系中影响着供应商的经营业绩与风险,供应商会根据客户的特征来选择披露不同程度的社会责任信息,因此客户集中度在一定程度上会影响企业的社会责任披露。本文利用2010年至2021年中国沪深A股上市公司的大样本面板数据,分析了客户集中度与企业社会责任之间的关系,我们发现,集中的客户基础与供应商的企业社会责任绩效呈显著的负相关。

Previous research on the impact of customer concentration on firm-level outcomes has focused on performance and financial risk. Corporate social responsibility (CSR), as one of the key issues in sustainable business management, has received increasing attention from scholars in recent years. However, far fewer studies have been conducted on the antecedents of CSR than on its outcomes, and few studies have examined what determines CSR inputs from the perspective of the buyer-supplier relationship. Customers, as one of the stakeholders of an enterprise, influence the business performance and risk of suppliers in the buyer-supplier relationship, and suppliers will choose to disclose different levels of social responsibility information according to the characteristics of their customers, so customer concentration will affect CSR disclosure to a certain extent. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between customer concentration and CSR using a large sample of panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2010 to 2021, and we find that a concentrated customer base is significantly negatively correlated with suppliers’ CSR performance.