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Bert Scholtens
Department of Finance
University of Groningen
PO Box 800, Groningen, 9700 AV,
Netherlands
E-mail: L.J.R.Scholtens@rug.nl
Finance as a Driver of CSR 33
Introduction
Finance is grease to the economy. As such, it can also
affect the sustainability and social responsibility of the
firm. The World Business Council for Sustainable
Development sees the financial industry as a leader
with respect to sustainability, and the industry itself
claims it makes the world a better place to live in
(Schmidheiny and Zorraquı´n, 1996). Socially
responsible investing and shareholder advocacy would
promote socially and environmentally desirable
activities. Academics are more skeptical. They find
that the theoretical arguments as well as the empirical
evidence so far are rather poor. Financial performance
is only weakly linked to corporate social responsible
behavior; many papers even find a negative relationship
between the two (see Margolis and Walsh, 2001).
Furthermore, socially responsible investments do not
earn significantly higher returns than investments that
do not take account of the firm’s non-financial
behavior (Bello, 2005). In addition, the sheer size of
current socially responsible investments seems much
too small to have any effect on the cost of capital or the
direction of corporations (Heinkel et al., 2001). This
has been a reason to qualify the impact of shareowners
on firm behavior as rather limited (Haigh and Hazelton,
2004; Johnsen, 2003).
The enthusiasm by some and the skepticism by
others bear resemblance to the debate about the link
between finance and economic development. Here
too, we have enthusiasts and skepticists. Schumpeter
(1912) is a member of the first group. He stressed the