Applying the Corporate Social Responsibility to the Shipping Industry

Abstract

Corporate financial distress and cashflow liquidity constraints are seen to intensify during prolonged recessionary business cycle phases. On the other hand, companies that consistently pursue corporate social responsible strategies pay attention to smoothly cater towards their stakeholders even at harsh market times. This study investigates dynamic perspectives of corporate financial distress and social responsibility interactions, in a company life-cycle setting. The shipping industry is taken as an empirical case to study these issues at hand, based on a selected sample of 84 publicly-listed shipping companies, over 2010–2016. The empirical findings indicate that positive corporate social responsibility approaches minimize financial distress probabilities for shipping companies. Furthermore, this inverse interaction between positive corporate social responsibility and financial distress is found to be more robust for shipping companies in their mature stage of their life-cycle path.