Deriving Corporate Social Responsibility Patterns in the MSCI Data

Abstract

Empirical research effort over Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is typically concentrated on a limited number of aspects. We focus on the whole set of CSR activities to find out if there is a structure in those. We take data on the four major dimensions of CSR: environment, social & stakeholder, labor, and governance, from the MSCI database. To find out the structure hidden under almost constant average values, we apply a modification of K-means clustering with its complementary criterion. This method leads us to discover an impressive process of change in patterns that we predict will continue in the future.