Manuscript title: The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility as a Marketing Investment on Firms’ Performance: A Risk-Oriented Approach

Purpose—In light of the growing interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is still controversy regarding its impact on firms’ performance. In this paper, we examine the effects of CSR initiatives, as a marketing investment on firms’ performance. Our study provides valuable insights for CSR practitioners and researchers, especially in the banking sector. Design/methodology/approach—we treat CSR initiatives as investment, and consequently the returns appear over the long term. We use the stochastic frontier analysis approach (SFA) which is a forward-looking financial market-based metric that captures the firm's long-term performance. We focus on the banking industry as it confronts a variety compound of risk. Findings—we find that CSR implementation is positively reflected in profit efficiency, regardless of the strategic commitment to implementing CSR and firm size, as these variables do not influence the CSR–performance relationship. However,, we find that firm age and competitive positioning have a significant impact on the CSR–performance relationship. Research limitations/implications—this study has been conducted in an emerging market (Egypt) where social situations may require special and immediate attention. Thus, it should be replicated in different countries with different cultures, especially developed ones that are more sensitive to social responsibility matters. Originality/value—our study provides valuable insights to CSR practitioners and researchers, especially in the banking sector. We provide empirical evidence on the importance of CSR and its positive impact on bank performance in emerging markets.


Introduction
Several companies have implemented Corporate Social Responsibility strategies (CSR), which involves adherence to improving community welfare through voluntary business exercises and corporate resource contributions (Kotler & Lee, 2005), as well as company policies for the defense of human rights, in order to strive against corruption, and to achieve transparency in the notification of CSR initiatives (Hategan et al., 2018). It is often considered the most efficient way to address social problems (Gatti et al., 2019).
It is noteworthy that CSR initiatives use different names, classifications, and definitions (Téllez, 2017;Vilanova et al., 2009), accordingly (Hamidu et al., 2015) suggest several stages. The first refers to volunteering and involvement in social well-being. The second is the duration of increasing interest and consciousness of employees' rights, stakeholder satisfaction, relationship management, organized CSR exercises, and consumer protection. The third is the instrumentality and sustainability duration which deals with CSR as a strategic tool in fulfilling organizational objectives. CSR is robustly institutionalized and standardized presently by various international indicators of accountable investing and sustainability.
The literature indicates that CSR provides numerous corporate strategic utilities, which reduce share price and systematic risks (Albuquerque et al., 2019), and the cost of funding (Chava and Purnanandam, 2010), it increases sales and price premiums , customer motivation and satisfaction (Lacey et al., 2012), the trust in companies' efforts (Du et al., 2013), as well as the good image and reputation of firms (Fombrun et al., 2000;Koh et al., 2014;Schnietz and Epstein, 2005). 4 Similarly it can enhance employees' performance and have a positive effect on customer attitude and purchase intention (Uhlig 2020;van Doorn et al., 2017) and gain a competitive advantage for firms (Du et al., 2007).
Important changes have arisen in both the practitioners and researchers; these changes have required that each function, activity, and initiative in the organization has a role in maximizing both firm and shareholder value (Gruca and Rego, 2005). Indeed, changes have led to a recognition that the relationship between marketing and finance must be managed systematically (Hyman and Mathur, 2005). No longer can managers tolerate relying on traditional assumptions that positive marketing initiatives, activities, and efforts will be mechanically reflected in the best financial results (Srivastava et al., 1998); therefore managers are required to provide greater accountability for marketing expenditure (Hanssens et al., 2012), and adopt a perspective that considers intellectual capital as assets that must be cultivated and leveraged through initiatives, activities, and efforts that may help companies measure the financial effect of the decisions pertaining to those forms of intellectual capital.
However, many firms that have adopted and invested in programs based on such drivers have run into financial difficulties (Srivastava et al., 1998) because they spent too lavishly on initiatives that were not ready to pay extra fees, so a lot of firms went bankrupt as a result of these experiences.
Thus, common sense makes it clear that expenditure on managerial initiatives and orientation programs is subject to the diminishing returns law (Rust et al., 2004), and the companies provided an 5 incorrect assessment of their ability to benefit from such initiatives to generate sustainable positive cash flows (Hogan et al., 2004).
The most important lesson to be learned from these experiences is that firms require more dynamic ways to understand the bonds between marketing expenditure drivers such as CSR, and both firm and shareholder value. The importance of being able to understand and evaluate the expenditure drivers has become widely acknowledged. But the main problem is: how can we measure the return on CSR investment to leverage the firm's performance?
CSR as a strategic management tool (Porter and Kramer, 2006) or as a marketing tool (Astara et al., 2015) is both frittered away and disconnected from business and strategy, concealing many of the greatest opportunities for corporates to benefit society. Many companies deal with investments in social issues as a short-run investment strategy to strive against loss both of image and reputation.
Consequently, they practice CSR activities as a random, reflective response to short-run challenges (Werbel and Wortman, 2000). It is noteworthy that many companies fail to take into account the economic aspects of CSR initiatives, and assess them as expenditure drivers, not as investments that can generate long-term profits (Murray and Montanari, 1986;Rust et al., 2004). To gain long-term competitive advantage, Porter and Kramer (2006) suggest focusing on the interdependence of corporate financial goals and CSR activities and, as a result, recommend implementing CSR initiatives in the company's strategies and operations.
Measuring the financial impact of CSR initiatives is still an ambiguous matter, due to the paucity of a clear set of metrics, which makes the debate on CSR controversial, and it remains a conflicted issue (Fiori et al., 2015;Izzo and di Donato, 2012). Consequently, managers have been unable to rationalize the associated investments and the allocation of rare resources in that area. Studies concerned with the relation between CSR and profitability have demonstrated conflicting results, 6 whether they found a negative (Aupperle and Van, 1989;Jensen, 2002;Marcoux, 2000;Waddock andGraves, 1997) , or positive (Alexander andBuchholz, 1978;Jo and Harjoto, 2011;Mahajan and Golahit, 2019;Moskowitz, 1972) relationship between the two factors. Moreover, even when it is practicable to set up a connection between CSR and financial performance, the relationship between cause and effect between them is not apparent, and subsequently, an extra investigation is required (Preston and O'Bannon, 1997;Waddock and Graves, 1997).
In this context, the authors have identified four reasons regarding the conflicting results, which are as follows: First it is necessary to manage these practices as an avoidable cost decreasing shareholders' dividends and firms' value, and recognize them as a negative market premium (Fiori et al., 2015) rather than managing them as an investment.
Second, inconclusive findings may stem from measurement errors; the nature of the metrics used in measuring firms' performances are gauges that swing between traditional financial measures concentrating on short term performance and market-based measures which are more suitable because they concentrate on the long term.
Third: there may be a model misspecification and an insufficient scope of the data set (Igalens and Gond 2005); the relation between social and financial performance is affected by different factors represented in moderator variables (Krasnikov et al., 2009), which help to activate the previous relationship and should be integrated into model specification according to the type of industry.
Fourth: the relationship between CSR and firm performance may be U-shaped in nature (Kim and Oh, 2019;Udayasankar, 2008). In other words, an increase in CSR may push cost resources to be more enlarged, thereby reducing financial performance (Kim and Oh, 2019). On the other hand, an increase in CSR may align with the other stakeholders, thereby increasing financial performance.

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Overall, the literature has indicated that there are two opposite theoretical perspectives to explain the relationship between CSR and firm performance: the first is based on agency theory, which indicates that there are no direct ties with firm performance, and suggests it may decrease shareholder wealth, while the second perspective adopts stakeholder theory, which points out that CSR positively correlates with stakeholder satisfaction, and can generate positive cash flows (Mishra and Modi, 2016). However, the studies regarding this point have not resulted in solid feedback (Izzo and di Donato, 2012;Margolis and Walsh, 2003;McWilliams and Siegel, 2001;Vogel, 2005). This lack of consensus on the nature of the relationship and the small number of such studies have motivated our research. Consequently, with the current study, the authors attempted to fill a gap and derive this relationship with a new set of variables and profit efficiency of the banks, in addition to addressing CSR as a marketing investment as researchers suggest (Crane and Desmond, 2002). The key challenge we address in this article is measuring the financial impact of CSR on profit functions via a solid metric that helps the banks' decision-making support system, as well as activating marketing accountability (Rust et al., 2004).
At the same time, because a limited understanding of CSR in the developing economies poses a pressing challenge for both the practitioners and researchers (Li et al., 2010), our applied study is conducted on an emerging market (Egypt), especially as there has been a dramatic increase in controversial issues associated with CSR in emerging markets (Bogdanich, 2008) and in one of the most important sectors (the banking sector) that plays a predominant role in the economy (Belasri et al., 2020).

Relevant literature and hypotheses development 8
The input function consists of a set of variables represented in the cost of deposits, labor, marketing, and purchased funds, which are measured as ratios. Thus, the cost of deposits are computed as the interest payable divided by the total amount of deposits, the cost of labor as the salary expenses divided by the total number of personnel, the cost of marketing as the marketing cost divided by total assets, and the cost of purchased funds as the total expenses of such funds divided by the total amount of purchased funds.
Meanwhile, banks process these elements to generate preferable outputs including loans, securities, and services, calculating the outputs as prices. The price of loans is calculated as interest income from loans divided by the loan portfolio, the price of securities as revenues from securities divided by securities portfolio, and the price of services revenues from fees divided by total assets. Moreover, we employ both financial equity capital as the total shareholder equity and fixed assets as the total fixed assets, while we measure profit as the difference between a bank's operating revenues and expenses.
Based on the literature, we propose a model where we adopt the perspective of stakeholder theory that acknowledges the positive impact of CSR on firm performance against agency theory. According to behavioral theory, we determine the moderating factors of the model, and consistent with portfolio theory, we incorporate the risk factor in the body of the model.

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The literature review indicated that traditional marketing and accounting studies are interested in static profit metrics, such as return on investment, equity, and assets (Hogan et al., 2002). In this context, officials are concerned about whether the organizations boost their performance, and how far they do this compared to their competitors having adopted CSR initiatives. Therefore, our study deals with profit efficiency, which measures the extent to which the organization is close enough to generate maximized profits under specific price inputs and outputs, and compared with the best practice frontier.
Profit efficiency means the percentage of profits that an organization could have achieved compared with the profits it generated (Krasnikov et al., 2009). In other words, this means the largest percentage of profits the most efficient bank could have achieved, compared with the actual profit of the bank (Maudos and Guevara, 2004).
Previous studies have suggested that CSR is a driver of both tangible benefits, represented, for instance, in better financial performance, an increase in share price, a price premium, and superior performance (Reinartz et al., 2004), and intangible benefits, represented in stakeholder satisfaction, investor trust, enhanced brand image, and as a source of competitive advantage (Slavova, 2013). Even if organizations adopting the CSR initiatives suffer rising costs, their power to deliver offers that satisfy their stakeholders ensures that they can generate higher levels of profitability (Krasnikov et al., 2009). We therefore formulate our first hypothesis as follows: Hypothesis 1: CSR initiatives have a positive impact on profit efficiency.

Moderating factors of the effect of CSR on Profit Efficiency
In line with the behavioral theory of the firm, the motivation of a firm to follow a specific strategic action and its ability to take advantage of the action may influence the impact of the action on its performance (Jayachandran and Varadarajan, 2006). The literature states that there are two important types of factors -firm-level factors and adoption-related factors (Krasnikov et al., 2009) -which may influence the impact of CSR initiatives on firms' performance.

CSR Strategic commitment (firm-related factor)
It appears that firms who endorse a formal approach to strategic commitment are likely to develop deep sound into the request of social responsibility, thus achieving empowerment and boosting CSR policy and practice (Kalyar. et al., 2012).
Companies that adopt CSR initiatives differ in their level of commitment to using the CSR strategy.
Implementing CSR with the proper strategic focus is important for companies, in order that they can take advantage of building a strong image and reputation (Jia, 2020), as well as generating value for various stakeholders (Téllez, 2017). Moral duty aside, this increasing commitment to CSR is motivated, at least partially, by the growing sense that consumers -a key stakeholder group -reward good corporate citizens through greater, more sustained sponsorship (Du et al., 2007).
The literature suggests that when firms connect their CSR initiatives to stakeholders' potential preferences and channel resources to these initiatives, they become qualified to maximize CSR efforts in order to improve firms' performance (Peloza, 2006).
Hypothesis 2: Banks that are committed to CSR initiatives receive a higher increase in profit efficiency.

Firm age (adoption-related factors)
It is widely recognized that involvement in CSR initiatives increases as firms become older, given that CSR initiatives lead to improvements in a firm's image on the market, increasing sales, profitability, and financial performance (Badulescu et al., 2018). This is because of the increasing learning and experience curve, and the fact that long-established firms are constantly under stakeholder scrutiny (Gautam et al., 2016). On the other hand, some authors claim that older firms may depend on their reputation instead of CSR campaigns and are, subsequently, less involved in CSR, while young firms may need to build their reputation through CSR involvement and, consequently, try to benefit from CSR initiatives (Withisuphakorn and Jiraporn, 2016). It is worth mentioning that research results indicate that a firm's age affects CSR: in other words, firms which have a long enough experience in the business pay attention to aspects of CSR, due to improvements in business reputation which are reflected in firms' profitability (Gautam et al., 2016;Michelon et al., 2015;Waluyo, 2017) Based on this discussion, a hypothesis can be formed: Hypothesis 3: The older the banks, the higher the effect of CSR initiatives in increasing profit efficiency.

Competitive positioning (firm-related factor).
Effective CSR initiatives need to take into consideration the competitive context in which a particular set of CSR actions are likely to be executed. Meanwhile, a key element of the competitive context is the relative firm positioning along the CSR dimension (Bhattacharya and Sen, 2004). It is noteworthy that, competitive positioning plays an important role in both the formation of consumers' CSR beliefs about these brands, in other words, the belief that the company or brand is socially responsible, as well as the extent to which these beliefs are linked to both brand choice and the set of longer-term brand advocacy behaviors, such as positive referral behavior and elasticity in relation to negative brand information (Du et al., 2007). Weber (2008) also identified one of the greatest potential benefits of CSR for companies as increased revenue from higher sales and market share. Therefore, we hypothesize that: Hypothesis 4: The higher the increase in competitive positioning of banks which adopt CSR initiatives, the higher the increase in profit efficiency.

Control Variables
The literature has indicated that many bank characteristics should be taken into consideration when examining the CSR-profitability relationship (Luo and Bhattacharya, 2009). Therefore, we incorporated this into the analysis of different control variables, which, in theory, express the construct of both financial metrics and social performance. In this context, we include various bank and country-level controls in the analysis known to affect the CSR-profitability relationship. In the beginning, we take into consideration the characteristics of bank size because of how this influences the effect of CSR on bank efficiency; also, whether the bank is foreign or local may reflect on the cost of funds, and whether it operates in mergers and acquisitions (M&As), where successful merger and acquisition deals increase the profitability of firms. The CSR-profitability relationship could be due to improvements in operations, besides increasing efficiency. Finally, economic conditions may help 13 determine the overall CSR level of firms (Li et al., 2010) as well as influencing firms' performance, and the probability of CSR implementation was taken into account.
Linking CSR initiatives to financial performance Figure 1 shows a broad overview of the conceptual model that we used to evaluate the influence of CSR on profit efficiency. CSR is viewed as a marketing investment (Du et al., 2010;Crane and Desmond, 2002;Srivastava et al., 1998) that produces an improvement in profit efficiency. Research suggests the inclusion of three important types of factors that represent CSR drivers: first, firm-level factors (strategic commitment and competitive positioning); second, adoption-related factors (firm age), and third, control variables (size, foreign or local, mergers and acquisitions, and economic conditions). These factors are likely to drive CSR and activate the relationship between CSR and profit efficiency PEFF .
[Insert Figure 1 about here]

Testing of Hypotheses
The testing of hypotheses includes a sample of listed banks from the Egyptian commercial banking sector, and is carried out by employing the frontier efficiency approach to estimate profit efficiency by measuring to what extent a bank's outputs or profit are distant from the efficient frontier or "best practice" for a given set of banks (Bauer et al., 1993).
14 Applying a stochastic frontier analysis approach in estimating profit efficiency is becoming increasingly popular in the marketing and related literature streams (Grewal and Slotegraaf, 2007;Luo and Donthu, 2006). Overall, we implement the following steps to explore the effects of CSR on profit efficiency: first, we estimate profit function for listed banks; second, we employ the residuals from the regression equations to calculate efficiency scores; third, we estimate the impact of CSR implementation on profit efficiency.
[Insert Table 1 about here]

Sample Selection and Data
The starting point consisted of the population of banks listed on the stock exchanges of the Egyptian commercial banking sector. In this study, we consider seven years, thus the investigating period is from the first quarter of 2013 to the fourth quarter of 2019, for 12 out of the 13 banks that are listed on the Egyptian Stock Exchange. As a result, the dataset is balanced and consists of 336 data observations.
CSR data is collected from annual and periodic reports of banks, especially balance sheets and income statements of publicly traded banks. Other secondary data were collected by using the bank web pages.

Profit Efficiency Estimation
Because the authors treat CSR initiatives as investment and consequently the returns appear over the long term, we adopt the stochastic frontier analysis approach which is a forward-looking financial market-based metric that captures the firm's long-term performance. At the same time, our approach is similar to that used by Krasnikov et al. (2009) and which was previously supported by Berger and De Young (1997) and Berger and Mester (1997). The SFA approach can support the assessment of the operational performance of CSR banks from a multi-period perspective, and it enables a large number of variables to interact, thus providing a multidimensional analysis of the bank's performance (Belasri et al., 2020).
We adjusted the SFA by risk, according to Basel committee requirements, and employed moderator variables to assess profit efficiency through profit functions which constitute operating profits grounded on the prices of inputs and outputs. We then summarized the profit function for a specific bank at time t (Equation 1), which models the log of a bank's operating profit Vp it .
(1) ln(Pr it + ∆) = f(ln P it , ln I it , ln Z it , ln R it , ln v p it ) where Pr it refers to the operating profits of the bank, I it refers to the prices of outputs (loans, securities, and services), P it refers to the variable input prices (deposits, labor, purchased funds, and marketing), Z it refers to the fixed inputs (financial equity and fixed assets) and R it are the categories of banking risk according to Basel II pillar1 (Credit Risk, Market Risk, and Operational Risk). It is noteworthy that the relationship of CSR to risk, incorporating adjusted returns for risk, will help the officials to make returns comparable from one firm to another (Husted, 2005).
Following previous studies, we add a constant, Δ, to the operating profits of all banks in the sample to ensure that the values are positive (Berger et al., 1993;Krasnikov et al., 2009).
Higher values of ln (vp it ) refer to higher profit efficiency because this reflects the bank's ability to gain profit exceeding the industry average.
To calculate profit efficiency PEFF it we deem the bank with extreme residual to refer to the efficient frontier (Equation 2), and then we compare the distance between the residual of a focal bank and the higher residual for a given period from the profit function (Equation 1)
We conducted the one-year lagged value of profit efficiency ( ) to explain inertia in FEFF it -1 operational or profit efficiency. The expression CSR refers to CSR implementation lagged by a it -1 time to reflect the notion that its effect on efficiency could not be shown instantly. Also, we used a To reduce the impact of outliers, the results were examined for validation by computing with varying levels of truncation (5% and 10%) and we found no significant differences in the results, or in their direction, and further, the box-plot indicated there are no outliers in the values of the profit efficiency.

Results of Model Estimation
The hierarchical model was implemented to estimate the impact of implementing the CSR initiatives by using its two models of variation as detailed in Equation 3 Table 1 about here]

Sensitivity Analysis
The previous models have shown that investment in various areas of marketing expenditure may have extended effects on diverse types of organizational performance (Rust et al., 2004). Moreover, it is necessary to take into consideration the effects of investments that have been conducted in previous periods in the long run; these may lead to changes in profit efficiency. The results were examined by tracking the sensitivity of the model according to the following: Estimation of the profit functions were made using lagged values (one year, two years) in relation to investments spent in the field of 20 CSR through the components of profit functions in the balance sheet statements and income statements to alleviate endogeneity concerns (Chang et al., 2014).

Profit efficiency scores were derived using Equation 2
Finally, re-estimations of the profit efficiency models were conducted by using the profit efficiency scores. The detailed results in Table 4 show that the sensitivity analysis results were largely consistent with the previous results.

Discussion
The current study examined the influence of CSR initiatives implementation on firms' performance.
Although the literature shows that the relationship is not altogether clear, the results provide evidence that CSR initiatives as a marketing investments proposal have positive effects on profit efficiency, and it is worth mentioning in this context that a number of researchers have found a positive and significant relationship between CSR initiatives and accounting-based static financial gauges (ROI, ROE, and net interest income) in the banking sector (Inoue & Lee, 2011;Siw, 2017;Wu and Shen, 2013). Hence this result is consistent with stakeholder theory.
On the other hand, other authors maintain that firms aim to maximize profit, not their value, which includes the welfare of society, and that imposed CSR initiatives puts pressure on the firms' profits, as these have no relation to the economic role of firms (Brammer et al., 2006;Jensen, 2001;Sundaram and Inkpen, 2004). The findings indicate that firms that are committed to keeping track of CSR initiatives are not able to gain profit efficiency. This may be because CSR is considered as an 21 array of core policies to adopt a corporate position and orientation to meet the needs and expectations of multiple stakeholders (Cheng et al., 2014).
We found that the higher the competitive positioning, the higher the profit efficiency in firms that implement CSR initiatives, since expectations of stakeholders may probably increase. This result is consistent with the study of Bai and Chang (2015). The results do not boost the conception that larger firms are more likely to reflect positively on profit efficiency in firms that implement CSR initiatives, in contrast with the findings of Godfrey et al. (2009) and the notion of enjoyment of economies of scale that increase profitability. This finding may be due to the fact that the relationship is U-shaped in nature (Udayasankar2008).
It is noteworthy that, the results boost the conception that firms with higher competitive positioning are more likely to receive many advantages from implementing CSR initiatives. This may be due to increased expectations of stakeholders from leading companies in the marketplace, in accordance with the findings of Mishra and Modi (2016), which indicated that superior marketing capability as a moderating factor plays a stronger role in maximizing firm value through activating CSR initiatives.
This also coincides with the findings of prior research (Acharyya, 2008;Bai and Chang, 2015; Cegliński and Wiśniewska, 2016) which showed financially positive outcomes of implementing CSR initiatives.
However, our findings point to the older firms in the marketplace being more likely to enjoy higher profit efficiency than the younger ones, because they have more experience. This finding supports the conjecture that older firms may need to differentiate their CSR orientations (Singh and Aggarwal, 2011) to benefit from implementing CSR initiatives, and become much more responsible in terms of diversity and environmental awareness (Robbins et al., 2000;Withisuphakorn and Jiraporn, 2016) in 22 contrast with the findings of Badulescu et al. (2018), who indicated that the relationship was not linear, although young firms were less involved in social responsibility actions.

Implications for Firms
The results of the present study offer some insightful implications for practitioners in the banking sector who implement CSR initiatives. Thus, the study should attract close attention and interest from policymakers and corporate managers as follows: The most remarkable result is the positive effect of CSR initiatives on profit efficiency in general; it provides evidence that the implementation of CSR initiatives improves profit efficiency by 2.95%.
Intrinsically, the results introduce solid support for the ability of CSR to grow banks' operational profit. Consequently, CSR initiatives should be an integral part of companies' business strategy rather than what drives them (Bhattacharya and Sen, 2004;Donaldson and Preston, 1995;Kang et al., 2016) to set a normative framework (Slavova, 2013;Vilanova et al., 2009), thus enabling managers to create sound CSR initiatives for business and to make them work (Jones and Wicks, 1999;Joyner and Payne, 2002;McWilliams et al., 2006;McWilliams and Siegel, 2001). Furthermore, it should provide benefits to businesses and be a source of innovation and competitive advantage (Kjeldsen, 2013).
In addition, these actions should be disclosed not only according to mandatory requirements but also by disclosing detailed additional information. This should be promoted especially across social media and through public relations, rather than only by corporate advertising or corporate releases (Morsing and Schultz, 2006), in addition to empowering stakeholders to become engaged in putting the priorities of its aspects of investments.
In other words, CSR initiatives should be viewed not merely as a marketing tool, but rather as a means to create dual customer value: customer trust (Cegliński and Wiśniewska, 2016) loyalty, 23 retention and acquisition, market share, and customer equity (Kotler and Amstrong, 2016;Rust et al., 2004).

Implications of moderating effects results
The findings indicate that managers should take into consideration the conditions which can activate the impact of CSR initiatives on firms' profit efficiency, and should be patient because the outcomes of implementing CSR -as investments -do not appear immediately. They need a period of time to be positively reflected in firms' performance, as it improves over time. Managers should be aware of the responsibility placed on old firms in their markets and the high expectations of stakeholders toward them regarding social responsibility. Our results show that old firms in the marketplace which implement CSR enjoy higher levels of profit efficiency compared to young ones.

Implications for different levels of management
The findings of this study will address many concerns, including the complexity and uncertainty associated with the implementation of social responsibility programs as long-term investment proposals rather than cost drivers (Heugens and Dentchev, 2007;McWilliams et al., 2006), and will enrich the function of chief marketing officers (CMOs) in leading firms to keep tracing CSR initiatives. Low awareness of firms' CSR initiatives is a crucial obstruction in their endeavors to maximize business interest from their CSR investment (Du et al., 2010).
Thus, the present findings help firms to overcome the communication gap between chief marketing officers and management teams, especially that of chief information officers (CIOs). The relationship between these two parties is crucial to reap strategic benefits from their CSR initiatives (Du et al., 2007), but it suffers from contradictory goals and misperceptions: while CMOs perceive CIOs as giving attention to efficiency with little knowledge of marketing, CIOs believe CMOs are not 24 interested in the resource planning required to invest in CSR initiatives (Commander, 2008;Krasnikov et al., 2009). Positive results can be exploited in the area of effectiveness. Therefore, CMOs can illustrate the need for the importance of supporting the implementation of CSR initiatives, but without ignoring the CIOs' points of view (Krasnikov et al., 2009;Mishra and Modi, 2016).
Building strong CSR strategic commitment could drive a firm to reap profits from CSR initiatives more quickly than if they do it as just a set of initiative policies (Peloza and Shang, 2011).
It is noteworthy that our findings also provide support that reflects the higher competitive positioning of increasing profit efficiency, since expectations of stakeholders may probably also increase, to signal better market performance (Singh and Aggarwal, 2011).

Research Contributions
Our approach is different from that of much existing research in the area of measuring quantitative effects of CSR initiatives on firm performance because:  To the best of our knowledge, in the context of measuring the financial impact of CSR initiatives our study is the first one to adjust stochastic frontier analysis by taking into account the requirements of portfolio theory literature, which states the need to have two conditions to apply the efficient frontier that leads to maximizing the expected utility return and minimizing the risk for varying levels of expected return (Sharp et al., 1998), and consequently that value cannot be created without sustainable risk-taking (Acharyya, 2008).
 It adds to the area of the marketing-finance interface by centering on integrating across the CSR initiatives as one of the marketing investment proposals in finance and accounting literature, besides identifying moderators of the effect of CSR on profit efficiency, thus 25 attracting attention to a phenomenon that is increasingly gaining momentum amongst stakeholders.
 It provides a calibrated mechanism that is considered a microeconomic measure of productivity to measure the marketing expenditure drivers as investments and calculates their return, consequently developing benchmarks for marketing impact and rationalizing the marketing decisions.
 The research provides empirical evidence on the importance of CSR and its positive reflection on firms' performance in emerging markets, especially the banking sector, which might mean increasing awareness of CSR in emerging markets.

Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research
As with other empirical studies, the current research has some limitations which in turn open doors for future research in the area. First, it would be of significance to examine the research model in other industries, because the service industry is process-oriented, and each sector has its unique characteristics. Second, the study has been conducted in an emerging market (Egypt) where social situations may require special and immediate attention. Thus, it should be replicated in different countries with different cultures, especially developed ones that are more sensitive to social responsibility matters, in order to create a kind of enrichment and knowledge accumulation in the area of the impact of marketing assets on improving firms' performance. Third, the study aims to find out the impact of CSR initiatives on the profit function according to the risk components as in the Basel Committee. It may be deemed appropriate to investigate the impact of CSR initiatives on the cost function within the context of industry-specific risks.

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Finally, in the context of quantitative studies, it may be useful to supplement this research with a series of studies that include researching the impact of CSR initiatives on customers' referral behaviour, such as cross-selling, and up-selling.