Corporate Social Responsibility and Cash Value Creation by Emphasizing the Moderating Role of Business Strategy1

The purpose of this paper is to value the economic, ethical and legal dimensions of corporate social responsibility by a new method and their impact on firms’ value creation, according to the moderating effect of business strategy. To do this, a combined index based on accounting variables and average decimal ranking method, is used to determine the value of economic, ethical and legal dimensions of corporate social responsibility. To measure the value creation of companies, value-based financial performance measures (economic value added, cash value added) was used.  To determine the strategy type (defensive, analytic, aggressive) according to the theoretical business strategy framework of Miles and Snow (1978, 2003), a combined index is used. The combined index consists of ratio of R&D expenses to sales, ratio of employees to sales, sales growth rate, ratio of SG&A expenses to sales, standard deviation of total number of employees and net property, plant, and equipment scaled by total assets. The moderating effect of business strategy is investigated based on strategy precedence and strategy type. The sample consists of 104 firms in a period from 2011 to 2018. To test hypotheses, the multivariate linear regression model and panel data method are used. The results show a significant positive relation of the economic, legal and ethical dimensions of corporate social responsibility to the value creation; Moreover, business strategy has a positive and significant effect on the relationship. Based on the results, the more aggressive a business strategy, the more effective on the relationship between corporate social responsibility dimensions and value creation.