Water resource management and financial performance in high water‐sensitive corporates

Abstract

Water is a valuable resource in the world, and water resource management is an important aspect of corporate social responsibility. Does water resource management affect corporate financial performance? What is the influencing path? To find the potential relationship and influencing mechanism between water resource management and corporate financial performance, based on configuration thinking, we selected 259 A‐share listed manufacturing corporates from 2015 to 2021 as research samples, using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method (fsQCA) to explore the configuration and influencing path of water resource management affecting financial performance. Then we analyzed it with the configuration that CSR score (excluding “environmental responsibility”) affects financial performance. Our results show that: (1) poor water management and low CSR score will lead to bad corporate financial performance, but the former's severity of negative impact on corporate financial performance is more than that of the latter. Specific configurations indicate that companies with little water‐related concrete actions implemented and technology innovation will severely hurt the financial performance. (2) Good water resources management cannot directly achieve high financial performance while high CSR score can make it, indicating that water resource management is a necessary but not sufficient condition for high corporate financial performance. Our research has unmasked the "black box" influencing mechanism of water resource management on corporate financial performance to some extent, which makes the configuration relationship between water resource management and financial performance clearer, therefore owns certain theoretical significance and practical value in the field of CSR and environmental management.