Title: Corporate social responsibility and debt maturity: the moderating role of CSR reporting quality

Authors: Sonia Boukattaya; Abdelwahed Omri

Addresses: GEF-2A Lab, Institut Supérieur de Gestion de Tunis (ISG Tunis), Université de Tunis, Bardo, 2000 Tunis, Tunisia ' GEF-2A Lab, Institut Supérieur de Gestion de Tunis (ISG Tunis), Université de Tunis, Bardo, 2000 Tunis, Tunisia

Abstract: The present paper aimed to examine the moderating effect of CSR reporting quality on the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and debt maturity. Here, we relied on a sample of French listed firms on the SBF120 index from 2013 to 2019. The collected data were analysed using the system GMM estimation to eliminate endogeneity problems when testing the research hypotheses. Based on the agency and signalling theories, our findings provide evidence that CSR performance has a negative effect on corporate debt maturity. High CSR firms use short-term debt financing to signal their high quality to the market and control the CSR overinvestment problems. Furthermore, we show that the negative effect of CSR on debt maturity is more pronounced in high CSR reporting quality firms. Our results are robust to alternative debt maturity measures.

Keywords: capital structure; debt maturity; corporate social responsibility; CSR; global reporting initiative; GRI; CSR disclosure.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBGE.2024.139654

International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, 2024 Vol.18 No.4/5, pp.609 - 626

Received: 15 May 2022
Accepted: 16 Apr 2023
Published online: 05 Jul 2024 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article