Competition and institutional drivers of corporate social performance

Research into corporate social performance (CSP) recently shifted to studying
its political economic dimensions. In this paper, we test the influence of price and technological competition and two institutional factors, mandatory reporting and monitoring by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and media, on CSP. Combining survey data with CSP ratings from Sustainalytics, we find that technological competition, monitoring by NGOs and media and mandatory CSP reporting foster CSP. However, price competition is not found to significantly influence CSP. This indicates that there is no support for the existence of a trade-off between anti-trust policy and CSP. Furthermore, our findings imply that governments can stimulate CSP by making CSP reporting mandatory.