Corporate social responsibility and information asymmetry in the Korean market: Implications of chaebol affiliates

Abstract

This paper examines how corporate social responsibility is related to the degree of asymmetric information in the Korean financial market. Recent theory argues that there is a negative relationship between a firm’s corporate social responsibility and its information asymmetry. To test this hypothesis, we use the environment, social and governance (ESG) score, published by the Korean Corporate Governance Service, to proxy a firm’s management practices toward socially responsible activities. In the entire sample of the Korean firms, we find contrasting results; the ESG score shows negative relationships with the price impact measure but statistically insignificant relationships with the dispersion of analyst forecasts. However, the ESG score shows negative relationships with both measures when we exclude chaebol affiliates from the sample. These findings are robust when we examine environmental, social and corporate governance scores separately. This set of results argues for the extant theory, expecting a negative relationship between a firm’s engagement in corporate social responsibility and asymmetric information. It further argues for the importance of firm characteristics in determining the influence of socially responsible activities.