Corporations balance irresponsibility with responsibility
Economists Matt Kotchen of Yale University and Jon Jungbien Moon of Korea University find that corporations offset bad actions with good actions.
Justin Lahart describes their conclusions:
Using a database that monitors companies on about 80 of measures of social responsibility, they found that when companies engage in bad behavior – which they call Corporate Social Irresponsibility, or CSI – they offset it by engaging in Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR. Usually, the offsets occur within the same category – if a company does something seen as hurting the environment, it does something else that’s seen as helping the environment. ... An exception is when companies’ corporate governance is the problem.Read it here.
