| Abstract [eng] |
Corporate social responsibility, due to newly established requirements and the emerging obligation for companies operating in the European Union to gradually disclose socially responsible business initiatives in their sustainability reports, will become increasingly integrated into new business strategies and values. Businesses, looking for solutions to satisfy society and stakeholders, will be forced to apply sustainable business models and adjust daily business cycles, while sustainable business data analysis and information disclosure will require a lot of money and time, which will affect the financial results of companies. The concepts of CSR used in the scientific literature and other sources differ, the methodology for evaluating its disclosure is not uniform. Due to the complexity and different concepts of corporate social responsibility, companies may misinterpret their policies, actions and announcements. The difference in CSR disclosure between companies in large and small economies is evident, even companies that appear to be transparent, only about 50 percents the most important indicators assessing CSR dimensions are disclosed in sustainability reports. In the scientific literature, large market capitalizations, the largest CSR initiatives of companies in the world economies are very actively studied, while companies of smaller economies countries studied extremely rarely, the number of such studies is very limited. Most of the previous empirical research finds a positive impact of CSR on corporate performance, but this relationship is not fully explored, as neutral and negative relationships are also obtained. The research aims to investigate the impact of corporate social responsibility on their financial results of listed companies in the Baltic States, where disclosure of sustainability reports is not very active, and CSR disclosure reports are often not audited by third parties. The financial results of companies are evaluated by return on assets, return on equity, investment profitability indicators, Tobin's Q and general liquidity indicators. Environmental, social and governance disclosure scores published by the Bloomberg database are used to assess corporate social responsibility. Research on the influence of social responsibility on the financial results of listed companies in the Baltic States is carried out using the regression analysis method. After analyzing the results of an empirical study of 23 listed companies in the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), it became clear that in 2018 - 2022 there was a neutral relationship between corporate social responsibility and financial results. The results showed that neither corporate environment, nor social, nor governance disclosure has a statistically significant influence on asset profitability, equity capital profitability, investment profitability, or company liquidity. Only governance disclosure has a statistically significant effect on the value of the company, measured by Tobin's Q. |
