Environmental vs. Social Responsibility in the Firm. Evidence from Italy

Abstract

Sustainable behavior should necessarily benefit both the environment and society. However, we cannot take for granted that socially responsible firms are also environmentally responsible—e.g., a firm might benefit its stakeholders while degrading the environment—and the reverse applies too—e.g., an environmentally responsible firm might disrespect its employees. Consequently, our purpose is checking whether social responsibility and green investments—proxying for a firm’s environmental responsibility—are complements, substitutes, or unrelated choices. Using a representative sample of Italian manufacturing firms, our econometric estimates uncover the empirical relationship between social responsibility and green investments at firm level. We find evidence of complementarity, since socially responsible firms: (i) Are systematically more likely to make green investments; (ii) identify green investments as a voluntary choice promoting business competitiveness much more than other firms. Finding complementarity between social and environmental responsibility has important implications. Policies favoring the transition to sustainable development should adopt a systemic approach considering the positive spillovers of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on environmental responsibility. Our evidence also suggests that firms indeed tend to behave in ways consistent with the holistic approach of the 2030 UN Agenda for sustainable development. Additional research should study how governance affects the CSR–environmental responsibility nexus.

A Comparative Study on Drivers for Corporate Environmental Responsibility, EU15 vs. EU-NMS13

“…For the EU15, the coefficients were highly significant and positive, showing that the odds of not going beyond environmental legislation is higher for older enterprises. Our findings are consistent with Ferri and Pini [70], who found a higher probability for older firms in Italy to make green investments and thus become more environmentally responsible. For the EU-MNS13 sample, the coefficients for age were positive but not significant, underlying that SMEs with longer business experience are more willing to go beyond legal requirements for environmental responsibility.…”

Non-Financial Information Disclosure in Italian Public Interest Companies: A Sustainability Reporting Perspective

“…Table 5 shows the values relating to the macro-regional distribution. The choice to carry out this subdivision derives from the marked differences existing among Italian regions, as underlined by numerous authors such as Felice, Garofoli, Scott, and Garofoli [75][76][77]; according to the purposes of the research, the aim is to check whether there are statistically significant discrepancies from the point of view of the Sustainable Development Goals in order to test if values within the entire population of listed Italian companies are similar or different considering the same population but split in two well-segmented samples from a geographical point of view [89][90][91]. In Table 5 the "zero gunger goal" has the same evaluation, statistically significant and positive both for the whole sample and for the two sub-samples.…”

Evaluation of Corporate Social Responsibility by Consumers: Use of Organic Material and Long Working Hours of Employees

“…Some studies examined the relationship between environmental effort and CSR and found a positive relationship between them. For example, Ferri and Pini [21] examined the relationship (i.e., complements, substitutes, or unrelated) between green investments and social responsibility using data from Italian manufacturing firms. They measured a firm's CSR intensity as the average of the six dummy variables indicating relationships with stakeholders, such as employees, other firms, universities and research centers, institutions, banks and trade associations, non-government organizations (NGOs), and consumers.…”