A central and contentious debate in many literatures concerns the relationship between financial and social performance. We advance this debate by measuring the financial–social performance link mutual funds that practice socially responsible investing (SRI). SRI fund managers have an array of social screening strategies from which to choose. Prior studies have not addressed this heterogeneity within SRI funds. Combining modern portfolio and stakeholder theories, we hypothesize that the financial loss borne by an SRI fund due to poor diversification is offset as social screening intensifies because better‐managed and more stable firms are selected into its portfolio. We find support for this hypothesis through an empirical test on a panel of 61 SRI funds from 1972 to 2000. The results show that as the number of social screens used by an SRI fund increases, financial returns decline at first, but then rebound as the number of screens reaches a maximum. That is, we find a curvilinear relationship, suggesting that two long‐competing viewpoints may be complementary. Furthermore, we find that financial performance varies with the types of social screens used. Community relations screening increased financial performance, but environmental and labor relations screening decreased financial performance. Based on our results, we suggest that literatures addressing the link between financial and social performance move toward in‐depth examination of the merits of different social screening strategies, and away from the continuing debate on the financial merits of either being socially responsible or not. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Building on the theoretical argument that a firm's ability to profit from social responsibility depends upon its stakeholder influence capacity (SIC), we bring together contrasting literatures on the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) to hypothesize that the CSP‐CFP relationship is U‐shaped. Our results support this hypothesis. We find that firms with low CSP have higher CFP than firms with moderate CSP, but firms with high CSP have the highest CFP. This supports the theoretical argument that SIC underlies the ability to transform social responsibility into profit. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Empirical findings across many nations show that exporters have superior productivity compared to nonexporters and that this relationship is driven by productive firms becoming exporters. The conclusion drawn from these studies is that there is little learning from exporting. We, however, assess if there are ex post benefits that accrue to exporting firms by examining innovation outcomes. We argue that exporters can often access diverse knowledge inputs not available in the domestic market, that this knowledge can spill back to the focal firm, and that such learning can foster increased innovation. We examine product innovation and patent application counts of a representative sample of Spanish manufacturing firms from 1990 to 1997. To conduct the analysis, we use a nonlinear GMM estimator for exponential models with panel data that allows for predetermined regressors and linear feedback. We find that exporting is associated with innovation. Moreover, the panel data allow us to explore the temporal relationship between exporting and innovation. In contrast to existing findings, we find evidence of learning by exporting-albeit in dimensions not previously examined in the literature.

We address independent and joint effects of contractual hazards and technological capabilities on governance, arguing that strong technological capabilities improve a firm's ability to govern transactions, making outsourcing feasible despite certain contractual hazards. Examining a random sample of 405 service contracts from a single information technology firm, we found that contractual hazards encouraged internalizing transactions. Weak technological capabilities increased the likelihood of subcontracting, but strong technological capabilities had no independent effect. The latter had impact only in the presence of certain contractual hazards. These results illuminate why firms facing similar levels of contracting hazards organize their transactions differently. 1 We acknowledge that capabilities come in many forms and variations-technological, managerial, operational, marketing-based, etc. We focus on technological capabilities, defined as superior ability to create a good or service that meets a customer's requirements for functionality, quality, and cost and schedule (see Hoetker, 2005: 78). We focus thus for several reasons. First, technological capabilities have been shown to have a strong influence on governance (e.g., Hoetker, 2005; Leiblein & Miller, 2003). Second, technological capabilities are central to resource-based theories of firm-specific advantage (see Kogut & Zander, 1992; Mahoney & Pandian, 1992; Martin & Salomon, 2003b). Finally, technological capabilities have been shown to be particularly important in high-technology industries such as information technology, which is examined here (e.g., Mayer, 2006; Mayer & Argyres, 2004; Martin & Salomon, 2003b).