Corporate Social Responsibility Coalitions: Effectiveness of Membership

This paper looks into Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) coalitions, contributing to an almost unexplored field of CSR research. This paper is the first to empirically compare CSR performance of coalition members to non-coalition members, examining coalition effectiveness. A signalling approach is used to hypothesize that due to information asymmetry and self-regulation within coalitions, coalition members score worse on CSR than non-members. It is expected that this negative relationship is weaker in more tangible industries. Using OLS regression, controlled for size, industry and financial performance, opposite results are found. Coalition members show higher CSR performance than non-members. Within the coalition, the product sector scores significantly better on CSR than the service sector. These results open a debate about what factors make coalitions effective and how coalition members differ from non-coalition members.