Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Firm Features in the Immediate Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic

We examine the relationships between key firm features and their Corporate Social Responsi-bility (CSR) scores in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. The pandemic created a unique environment that might have altered investor expectations, CSR priorities, and corporate strategies. We examine scores for (a) energy and water; (b) ethics, customer service, and labor; and (c) governance, as well as the (d) aggregate CSR score, and find that large mar-ket-cap and profitable firms are significantly associated with higher CSR energy and water management scores, CSR governance scores, and with higher CSR overall scores. This implies that these firms make these CSR investments, perhaps because of public scrutiny. However, these investments do not appear to lead to significant changes in key financial features such as market capitalization or Market Value of Equity (MVE), profitability as measured by Return on Assets (ROA), or growth (or the lack thereof) as measured by Book-to-Market ratio (BTM), at least in the short run suggesting that CSR benefits may be more strategic.