美国公司提供的企业社会责任信息披露外文翻译

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1、中文 3915 字 本科毕业论文（设计） 外 文 翻 译 外文题目 The Supply of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure Among U.S. Firms 外文出处 Journal of Business Ethics 2009（ 84）： P497-527 外文 作者 Lori Holder-Webb,Jeffrey R.Cohen,Leda Nath ,David Wood 原文 ： The Supply of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure Among U.S. Firms

2、Introduction Corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity is an area of intense and increasing interest both on the practice and academic fronts. Investor interest in rms that engage in these activities has grown dramatically. Between 1995 and 2005, investments of professionally managed assets gre

3、w from $7 trillion to $24.4 trillion, while the share of these assets invested in socially responsible investments grew from $639 billion to $2.29 trillion (Social Investment Forum SIF, 2006).At the same time, large institutional investors and multistakeholder groups including the UN Principles for

4、Responsible Investment project, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) (2006), and the CERES, a coalition of investors and public interest groups have focused attention on the materiality of social and environmental information to equity analysis. The magnitude and growth of socially responsible inve

5、sting (SRI) assets has driven an equally dramatic growth in the need for information. The objective of this study is to document the disclosure patterns of CSR by U.S. rms. Investors are not the only interested parties； CSR activity provides an increasing focus of product development and marketing p

6、ractitioners. Research demonstrates that certain types of CSR activity produce value for rms in terms of brand loyalty and marketing advantages (Brown and Dacin, 1997； Sen and Bhattacharya, 2001). As Handleman and Arnold (1999, p. 36) note,in any community, it is common to nd retailers donating to l

7、ocal charities, sponsoring little league sports teams, and proudly displaying the national ag. These actions demonstrate the retailers adherence to unwritten but powerful normative rules of acceptable social conduct, such as becoming involved with the community and promoting national pride. While th

8、e question of what exactly motivates rms to engage in CSR practices is a matter for ongoing research, it is clear from the growth in both SRI assets and customer markets for socially responsible goods that there is a need for information on these practices. The historical emphasis of traditional nan

9、cial information does not answer the needs of these parties, who require information not only about future earnings, but also about the rms social and environmental responsibility and interactions with the environment and home communities (Adams, 2004； Anderson et al., 2005). The concern with non-na

10、ncial factors as well as with equity returns results in a demand for greater accountability from managers. According to the SIF (p. 5), issues now occupying mainstream consciousnesscorporate governance, transparency, accountability, and greater disclosure have long been central to the practice of so

11、cial investing. Most of the work in this area is directed at examining disclosures from European and Australian rms, and nearly all multi-national studies indicate international differences in disclosure behavior. In North America, Cormier and Magnan (1999) proposed a cost/benet approach to environm

12、ental disclosures. The costs are the costs that other parties other than shareholders will use the information and the benets are the reduction in information asymmetry between managers and shareholders. Cormier and Magnan (1999) tested this on a sample of Canadian rms and found that variables such

13、as a rms reliance on capital markets and the trading volume for its stock were associated with increased environmental disclosure. They also conclude that environmental disclosures are increasing over time and that the increased disclosure in Canada could be a function of the less litigious reportin

14、g environment found in Canada as opposed to the United States. Alnajjar (2000) examined the 1990 social responsibility disclosures of Fortune 500 companies. He found that size and protability affected the quality and quantity of disclosure. Since there have been a number of changes in the disclosure

15、 environment since 1990 when the data was collected for the Alnajjar (2000) study and since the Cormier and Magnan (1999) looked at Canadian rms, it is not clear how U.S. corporations in the 2000s have responded to these increased demands for CSR information. Furthermore, prior research evaluating t

16、he content of CSR disclosures has focused primarily on a single reporting format (generally the annual report, more recently, the corporate website). Gray et al. (1995) has suggested that the use of a single format for analysis purposes may be signicantly limiting the understanding that can be deriv

17、ed about CSR disclosure behavior. We therefore extend this literature by exploring the entire identiable body of public disclosures made by the sample rms during 2004. A major contribution of our paper is the development of a means to assess directly the emphasis that management places on disseminat

18、ing a given type of information； prior research has largely relied upon frequency of disclosure alone as a proxy for emphasis. In this paper, we evaluate the state of reporting of social and environmental responsibility (often known as corporate social responsibility, or CSR) reporting among a sampl

19、e of U.S. rms to determine what types of information are being provided and through what means of transmission. We perform a content analysis on the disclosures made by a size-and industry-stratied sample of 50 publicly traded U.S. rms during 2004. Results suggest that companies disclose a wide vari

20、ety of CSR information through mandated and voluntary media. Consistent with prior research, we nd size-and industry-driven differences in disclosure behavior. Our results suggest differences in the pattern and volume of disclosure in U.S. rms when compared with other studies examining global enterprises. In the next section, we review the relevant theory and research and present the research questions and hypotheses. Then we describe the research method and discuss the results. We conclude with the implications of the study for reporting activists,