Beyond Aggregate ESG Scores: How Distinct CSR Dimensions Drive Innovation and Financial Performance Across Institutional Contexts

This study explains why distinct corporate social responsibility (CSR) dimensions have different innovation and financial consequences across institutional contexts. An integrated institutional‐resource‐stakeholder framework proposes that institutions shape CSR salience and credibility, CSR dimensions build heterogeneous resources, and stakeholder relationships mobilize those resources into innovation. Using 38,600 firm‐year observations from the United States, the United Kingdom, and China during 2010–2025, the study examines workforce, environmental, community, human‐rights, and product‐responsibility CSR; patent quantity, citation quality, and innovation value; and ROA, Tobin's Q, and sales growth. The five‐dimension specification improves adjusted explanatory power by 0.016–0.024 and reduces out‐of‐sample prediction error by 4.1%–5.3% relative to an aggregate CSR score. Component‐level CFA and HTMT results support construct distinctness. Workforce CSR has the largest innovation association, and Wald tests reject equality with each alternative dimension across all three innovation outcomes. Substantive implementation strengthens the workforce, environmental, and product‐responsibility pathways, whereas policy‐outcome gaps predict subsequent controversies. Labour protection, environmental policy stringency, and rule of law strengthen their theoretically matched CSR pathways. Innovation partially mediates financial effects, and monitoring, board diversity, auditor independence, and flexible work reinforce workforce CSR. A matched 2017 non‐financial‐reporting event study, dynamic‐panel models, a predetermined‐exposure instrument, balanced‐country analyses, and non‐patent outcomes provide convergent robustness. The study replaces aggregate ESG reasoning with a dimension‐specific account of responsible resource creation and sustainable value.