The philanthropic response of substantive and symbolic corporate social responsibility strategies to COVID‐19 crisis: Evidence from China

The COVID-19 epidemic broke out in China in January 2020, which triggered the largest wave of corporate philanthropic donations since the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Based on A-share listed firms in the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges in 2020, we study whether substantive and symbolic corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies affect corporate philanthropic responses during the COVID-19 crisis. We use the lagged annual donation and technical dimension scores (T scores) of rankins ratings (RKS) as proxies of CSR performance and CSR disclosure and then define the CSR gap as the gap between the two. The results show that substantive and symbolic strategies cause firms to have material differential responses in the COVID-19 crisis. Specifically, the CSR gap is negatively related to the possibility and the level of crisis donation. In addition, (1) this difference is more pronounced in the earlier period of the COVID-19 crisis; (2) the negative correlation is more pronounced in private firms; and (3) the crisis donation of firms with either strategy obtains no different response from the capital market. Our evidence suggests that the established CSR strategy influences the substantive response of Chinese firms to public emergencies, but their substantive response does not result in different reactions in the capital market.