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Over the past two decades, the topics of Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) have attracted an increasing amount of interest, reflecting a growing sensitivity of investors and corporations towards environmental, social and governance issues.

This survey offers an overview of the academic literature on ESG/CSR through the lens of investors, institutions and firms. We first discuss the definitions of ESG and CSR and their relationship to each other.

We next describe how ESG is measured and note problems with the measurement of and quality of ESG data and discrepancies between different measures of ESG. We then turn our attention to investors, examining what types of investors invest in ESG and the role of institutional investors in ESG. From the firm's perspective, we discuss why firms themselves conduct ESG. We also summarize the literature on the impact of ESG on firms: how ESG affects firms' financing, disclosure and reporting activities and firm performance. Finally, we describe other consequences of the focus of ESG and CSR on firms and investors.

This survey offers an overview of the academic literature on ESG/CSR through the lens of investors, institutions and firms.

The paper aims to examine how Indian non-financial service sector companies’ financial performance is influenced by their corporate social responsibility (CSR) expenditures. The paper also analyses whether family ownership has a moderating role in the CSR expenditure–financial performance association.

The study includes 288 non-financial service sector companies listed in India with 3,456 firm-year observations. Panel data regression analysis using data for 12 years, starting from 2010 to 2021, is carried out.

The study reveals a positive influence of CSR spending on financial performance measures (Tobin’s Q and return on assets). Mandatory CSR policies also influence the company’s performance. Additionally, family ownership has a positive moderating effect on CSR expenditure–financial performance (Tobin’s Q).

The study gives insights to the managers on how CSR expenditures can be used to maximise their benefits by supporting social causes, particularly in the case of firms with ownership structures where family involvement is there.

The prior studies analysing family ownership effect on the CSR–financial performance relationship are fewer, and in a country like India, where corporate philanthropy is a part of the family business culture, there is a need to understand how CSR spending influences firm performance.

Drawing upon a political economy approach, this article aims to analyze the transformations in the labor market within the context of contemporary capitalism, focusing on the phenomenon of financialization.

Financialization is defined as a distinct wealth pattern marked by a growing proportion of financial assets in capitalist wealth. Within financial markets, corporate performance is continuously assessed, in a process that disciplines management to achieve expected financial results, with consequences throughout corporate management.

We find that this phenomenon has implications for labor management, resulting in the intensification of labor processes and the adoption of insecure forms of employment, leading to the fractalization of work. These two mechanisms, added to the indebtedness of workers, constitute three elements for disciplining labor in contemporary capitalism.

We argue that these forms of discipline constitute a subsumption of labor to finance, resulting in an increase in labor exploitation. This formulation of the relationship between financialization and changes in the realm of labor also contributes to understanding the unrealizing potential of social free time in contemporary capitalism.

The present work aimed to present the perception of Tunisian professionals towards companies engaged in social responsibility practices and describe the tax evasion strategies of socially responsible Tunisian companies following the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (COVID-19) shock.

A survey was sent to 119 Tunisian tax administration auditors. Data analysis methods principal component analysis (PCA) and regression analysis were used. The data were collected through a questionnaire after the general containment of Tunisia from September 2020 to February 2021. These quantitative data were analysed using processing software (STATA).

Professionals of the tax authorities, particularly those in charge of the audit mission, aim for corporate profitability from the perspective of stakeholders that seek to integrate ethics and social responsibility into companies and consider employee morale a top priority. The results show that highly ethical and socially responsible professionals are far from practising aggressive strategies. Thus, an auditor from the tax administration is far from engaging in social responsibility to justify fraudulent acts. During the COVID-19 period, the role of these professionals was to prevent and detect fraud in the tax sector to fight corruption and investigate taxes based on sound regulations.

The results are consistent with optimal taxation theory, which postulates that a tax system should be chosen to maximise a social welfare function subject to a set of constraints. Professionals seek to make taxation much simpler for taxpayers by providing advice and consultation to manage tax obligations. The minimisation of tax or the play of tax values requires expertise in the field to respect legal constraints. Therefore, these professionals play a crucial role in tax collection, as the professionals' advice and suggestions can influence taxpayers' decision-making.

In recent years, academic researchers, policy makers and the public have become increasingly interested in corporate tax evasion behaviour. At the same time, companies are under increasing pressure to integrate CSR into the companies' decision-making processes, which has led to increased academic interest in CSR. Opportunistic tax minimisation reduces state resources and funds needed for government programmes to improve the social welfare of the entire community. This study represents an overriding concern not only for legal and tax authorities and companies, but also for shareholders and stakeholders.

The authors' study contributes to the existing literature by determining the state of play on corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices amongst Tunisian tax authorities' professionals. In Tunisia, an executive of the tax authorities in charge of the verification mission is required to verify the proper application of the accounting and tax legislation in force, follow up on tax control operations on declared taxes and validate the sincerity of the accounts. This study focussed on the tax evasion of companies engaged in social responsibility practices according to the judgements of Tunisian tax authorities' auditors during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

In this fast-changing world, digitization has become crucial to organizations, allowing decision-makers to alter corporate processes. Companies with a higher corporate social responsibility (CSR) level not only help encourage employees to focus on their goals, but they also show that they take their social responsibility seriously, which is increasingly important in today’s digital economy. So, this study aims to examine the relationship between digital transformation and CSR disclosure of Chinese A-share companies. Furthermore, this research investigates the moderating impact of governance heterogeneity, including CEO power and corporate internal control (INT) mechanisms.

This study used fixed effect estimation with robust standard errors to examine the relationship between digital transformation and CSR disclosure and the moderating effect of governance heterogeneity among Chinese A-share companies from 2010 to 2020. The whole sample consists of 17,266 firms, including 5,038 state-owned enterprise (SOE) company records and 12,228 non-SOE records. The whole sample data is collected from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research, the Chinese Research Data Services and the WIND databases.

The regression results lead us to three conclusions after classifying the sample into non-SOE and SOE groups. First, Chinese A-share businesses with greater levels of digitalization have lower CSR disclosures. Both SOE and non-SOE are consistent with these findings. Second, increasing CEO authority creates a more centralized company decision-making structure (Breuer et al., 2022; Freire, 2019), which improves the negative association between digitalization and CSR disclosure. These conclusions, however, also apply to non-SOE. Finally, INT reinforces the association between corporate digitization and CSR disclosure, which is especially obvious in SOEs. These findings are robust to alternative HEXUN CSR disclosure index. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the negative relationship between corporate digitalization and CSR disclosures is more pronounced in bigger, highly levered and highly financialized firms.

Digitalization and CSR disclosure are well studied, but few have examined their interactions from a governance heterogeneity perspective in China. Practitioners and policymakers may use these insights to help business owners implement suitable digital policies for firm development from diverse business perspectives.

This study aims to examine the impact of independent directors' ownership on corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. In line with the stakeholder-agency paradigm's prediction, the authors propose that higher independent directors' ownership is associated with higher CSR performance. By drawing on the attention-based view, the authors further examine firm-level conditions that impact the situated attention of independent directors holding high equity ownership as they are active agents.

The authors collected data covering the years 2009–2013 for firms listed in the S&P 500 index. The authors tested the hypotheses using firm fixed-effects models.

The results show that higher independent directors' ownership is associated with higher CSR performance. Prior firm performance and available slack resources are found to have diverse impacts on the association between independent directors holding high equity ownership and CSR performance.

This study highlights the importance of examining the performance-based incentives of independent directors on firms' CSR performance. This study also provides a better understanding of factors impacting independent directors' situated attention as boundary conditions.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the synergy of corporate governance (CG) with intellectual capital (IC) and to assess the moderating effect of profitability indicator on the aforementioned synergy using agency theory, resource-based view theory and theory of financial ratios as conceptual frameworks.

The sample includes 72 companies with a six-year data set drawn from the KSE 100 Index companies of Pakistan. In addition, the study adopts Pulic’s model to compute the efficiency of IC. The research uses fixed-effect panel regression for analysis and two-stage least squares regression (2SLS) to address endogeneity issues in the estimation process.

The results showcased that chief executive officer duality possesses negligible impact on IC efficiency (ICE), while independent directors, audit committees and board size tend to attain a strong association with IC. Moreover, it postulates that the moderation of return on equity strengthens the path between all governance components and ICE significantly.

The research uses a 2SLS regression analysis to explore how CG practices take hold on the effectiveness of IC in Pakistan while taking into account the moderating impact of profitability. The findings add to the body of knowledge on the value that strong governance practices have on businesses and society.

While the existing studies largely suggest that valuation uncertainty benefits acquirers, who apply discounts to targets' value attributable to information asymmetry, the authors argue that the opposite may be the case.

Through multivariate econometric analysis of transaction data, the authors establish the link between the degree of valuation uncertainty measured by targets' track of public listing and acquisition premia. The authors use text-mining tools to measure acquirer–target similarity and control for its role in intermediating the posited empirical relationships.

Having analyzed 618 acquisitions involving listed targets from China, the authors find that acquirers pay higher valuation premia for the more recently listed and relatively younger companies than for those with a longer history since floatation. Similar patterns apply to valuation multiples. Higher valuations are partially attributable to premia for control, as acquirers are likelier to buy a majority stake in the recently listed firms, especially if the latter are similar to them. Such transactions take less time to complete and involve a transfer of larger share blocks despite the higher degree of information asymmetry and a frequent lack of targets' operational profitability. The authors also observe a significant premium for target–acquirer similarity: acquirers appear to rush deal completion due to possible overestimation of targets' potential and familiarity bias.

The authors show that acquisition premia may be driven by acquirers' proclivity to place risky investment bets on the growth potential of opaque targets. This pattern may partially explain frequent failures of mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

This study proposes a novel measure for management’s horizon (short-termism or myopia vs long-termism or hyperopia) derived from easily obtainable firm-level accounting and stock market performance data. The authors use the measure to explore the impact of managements’ horizon on firms’ investment efficiency.

The authors rely on two commonly used but uncorrelated measures of management performance: accounting performance (return on capital employed, ROCE) and stock market performance (average abnormal return, AAR). The authors combine these measures to develop a multidimensional framework for performance, which classifies firms into four groups: efficient (high accounting and high market performance), poor (low accounting and low market performance), myopic (high accounting and low market performance) and hyperopic (low accounting and high market performance). The authors validate this framework and deploy it to explore the relationship between horizon and firms’ investment efficiency.

In validation tests, the authors show that management myopia (hyperopia) explains firms’ decision to cut (grow) research and development investments. Further, as expected, myopic (hyperopic) firms are associated with significantly more (less) accrual and real earnings management. The empirical tests on the link between horizon and investment efficiency suggest that myopic managers cut new investments while their hyperopic counterparts grow the same. Ultimately, the authors find that myopia (hyperopia) exacerbates(mitigates) the over-investment of free cash flow problem.

The authors introduce a framework for assessing management’s horizon using easily obtainable measures of performance. The framework explains inconsistencies in prior empirical research using different measures of performance (accounting versus market). The authors demonstrate its utility by showing that the measure explains decisions around research and development investment, earnings management and firm investments.

In the rapidly evolving digital economy, businesses face formidable pressures to maintain their competitive standing, prompting a surge of interest in the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation (DT). This study aims to assess the impact of AI technologies on corporate DT by scrutinizing 3,602 firm-year observations listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges. The research delves into the extent to which investments in AI drive DT, while also investigating how this relationship varies based on firms' ownership structure.

To explore the influence of AI technologies on corporate DT, the research employs robust quantitative methodologies. Notably, the study employs multiple validation techniques, including two-stage least squares (2SLS), propensity score matching and an instrumental variable approach, to ensure the credibility of its primary findings.

The investigation provides clear evidence that AI technologies can accelerate the pace of corporate DT. Firms strategically investing in AI technologies experience faster DT enabled by the automation of operational processes and enhanced data-driven decision-making abilities conferred by AI. Our findings confirm that AI integration has a significant positive impact in propelling DT across the firms studied. Interestingly, the study uncovers a significant divergence in the impact of AI on DT, contingent upon firms' ownership structure. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) exhibit a lesser degree of DT following AI integration compared to privately owned non-SOEs.

This study contributes to the burgeoning literature at the nexus of AI and DT by offering empirical evidence of the nexus between AI technologies and corporate DT. The investigation’s examination of the nuanced relationship between AI implementation, ownership structure and DT outcomes provides novel insights into the implications of AI in the diverse business contexts. Moreover, the research underscores the policy significance of supporting SOEs in their DT endeavors to prevent their potential lag in the digital economy. Overall, this study accentuates the imperative for businesses to strategically embrace AI technologies as a means to bolster their competitive edge in the contemporary digital landscape.