The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Company Capitalization

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming increasingly relevant in the Russian business. But the question that still remains for the companies is whether investments in CSR will bring returns and how this will affect the financial performance of the company. There are many research studying this topic on the example of the USA, Europe and many developing countries markets, but the Russia is still little studied due to the lack of information on the current policy. This paper examines the impact of CSR policies on company capitalization. The study uses a regression analysis of cross-sectional data for 60 companies for 2018, manually collected from the official websites of the companies. As a result, a negative relationship was found between total CSR expenditures and capitalization, but at the same time, the positive impact of some CSR indicators (environment, labor protection, company size and the availability of official CSR reports) was founded on capitalization.