Approaching the institutional environment through its regulative component, we distinguish between shareholder‐oriented and stakeholder‐oriented countries. Identifying first this classification with the distinction between common law versus civil law countries and using a large sample of 5,716 firm‐year observations that represents 1,169 individual firms in 25 countries between 2001 and 2011, we show that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) significantly reduces firms’ idiosyncratic risk in civil law countries but not in common law countries. Using then a more direct classification based on shareholder and employee protection scores, our findings suggest that CSR negatively affects firms’ idiosyncratic and systematic risks only in less shareholder‐oriented and more stakeholder‐oriented countries, respectively. These findings are similar in the different components of CSR with two notable exceptions: a high score in corporate governance reduces firm risk only in common law countries, and community involvement increases idiosyncratic risk in more shareholder‐oriented and less stakeholder‐oriented countries, respectively. Taken together, our results strongly support the view that the relationship between CSR and financial risk is moderated by the institutional context of the firm.

Social and environmental ratings provided by social rating agencies are multidimensional. Using the six sub-ratings provided by the Vigeo rating agency, we perform a principal component analysis and we highlight three main socially responsible (SR) dimensions related to (1) the direct non-financial stakeholders (employee, customers and suppliers), (2) the indirect stakeholders (environment and society) and (3) the financial stakeholders (stockholders and debt holders).We explore the link between stock returns and these three SR dimensions. Our main result is that, for each SR dimension, investors ask for an additional risk premium when they decide to hold non SR stocks. The cost of equity is thus lower for socially responsible firms. The average premium over the period 2003-2010 is larger for the components "direct non-financial stakeholders" and "financial stakeholders" than for the component "indirect stakeholders". For this last component, the premium obviously exists only since the end of 2008. Environment and community involvement have only recently become a more important risk factor in investors' minds. About the former risk premia ("direct non-financial stakeholders" and "financial stakeholders"), investors appear to penalize firms with the worst behavior in respect to their direct non-financial stakeholders and reward firms with good corporate governance practices