Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Governance and CEO compenastion incentives

Abstract: Society's awareness of the importance of environmental-, social- and economic issues has increased over the last decades. This increased interest has led to the development of the Corporate Social Responsibility concept (CSR) in which companies actively work simultaneously with environmental, social and economic issues that extend beyond what is legally required by these companies in order to achieve a more sustainable society. As the interest in CSR has increased, a debate whether CSR is value-creating or should be considered an agency cost has arisen. To approach this question previous researches have used the CEO compensation to examine if the engagement in CSR actually is an agency cost or a value creating activity and found that agency costs can be mitigated by tying incentives to performance. Based on these assumptions this study will examine the link between CSR and agency costs using the existence of a CSR related compensation incentives for CEOs related agency costs. This study is characterized to be positivistic and within the field of positive accounting research as it has deductive approach in which hypotheses are formulated that this study intends to test which are based on what fundamental economic theories and previous research have found that may affect agency costs. The empirical data are manually collected from companies’ on NasdaqOMX Stockholm 2016 annual reports followed by an analysis of the data using univariate t-test and multiple regressions in order to relate these findings to previous research. This study finds no direct evidence that CEO compensation incentives related to CSR affect agency costs which means that we have not closed the ongoing debate whether CSR engagement is creating shareholder value or should be considered an agency cost. Nonetheless, the results show indications that agency costs are higher for companies that use CEO compensation incentives related to CSR which indicates that CSR is not beneficial to shareholders but should instead be regarded as an agency cost at the expense of shareholders. The result also indicates that a positive accounting research is not particularly useful on a small stock market with reliable results because the findings can not be generalized in a broader perspective