Investigating the Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Firm's Short- and Long-Term Performance with Online Text Analytics

Abstract

Despite expectations of short- or long-term positive effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on firm performance, the results of existing research into this relationship are inconsistent partly due to lack of clarity about subordinate CSR concepts. In this study, keywords related to CSR concepts are extracted from atypical sources, such as newspapers, using text mining techniques to examine the relationship between CSR and firm performance. The analysis is based on data from the New York Times, a major news publication, and Google Scholar. We used text analytics to process unstructured data collected from open online documents to explore the effects of CSR on short- and long-term firm performance. The results suggest that the CSR index computed using the proposed text - online media - analytics predicts long-term performance very well compared to short-term performance in the absence of any internal firm reports or CSR institute reports. Our study demonstrates the text analytics are useful for evaluating CSR performance with respect to convenience and cost effectiveness.