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Article

The Impact of Ownership Structure on Corporate Social Responsibility Performance in Vietnam

by
Ching-Chung Lin
1 and
Tran Phuoc Nguyen
2,*
1
Department of International Business, Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Tainan City 710301, Taiwan
2
College of Business, Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Tainan City 710301, Taiwan
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2022, 14(19), 12445; https://doi.org/10.3390/su141912445
Submission received: 22 July 2022 / Revised: 24 September 2022 / Accepted: 26 September 2022 / Published: 29 September 2022

Abstract

:
In today’s business environment, a debatable concern is increasing on the importance of ownership structure on corporate social responsibility (CSR). With the purpose of clarifying more about this nexus, the study utilizes ownership concentration, managerial ownership, government ownership, and foreign ownership for ownership structure representation and explores their relationship with CSR performance under the Vietnamese companies’ context. Agency theory is employed to explain how the concept is formulated and website information, annual reports and the CSRHub database are where this research is based for data collection. With 65 firms in the analysis at the beginning of October 2019, the empirical findings unveil that managerial and foreign ownership are positively related, while ownership concentration and government ownership are not significantly linked to CSR performance.

1. Introduction

In contemporary business research, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has received tremendous attention from academicians around the world [1,2]. Within this focal point, there are a considerable number of academic papers noting the substantial advantages of possessing a good CSR performance, namely, enhanced financial performance [3], and higher returns [4] together with a competitive advantage [5] for corporations in their working environment. In addition, despite the effects of the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis, those companies with better CSR ratings still had higher stock returns and lower stock volatility [6,7]. Mahoney and Thorne [8] acknowledge that more firms think about how to integrate CSR ideas into their strategic plan to achieve the above advantages. A firm’s CSR performance is described as its capability to satisfy the economic, environmental, and social responsibility expectations from stakeholders [9].
In the business environment, corporate governance mechanisms, including ownership structure, play a very important role in shaping CSR-related activities and defining its performance [10,11].
Lee [12] asserts that different ownership structures affect firm decision-making so it is also expected to have an influence on CSR engagement decisions [13]. Regarding the nexus between equity ownership and CSR, equity ownership can be classified into equity ownership composition (a concentration of equity ownership and public/private equity ownership) and individual equity-owner types (e.g., institutional, government, foreign, managerial/insider, and family ownership) [14].
Equity owners and other stakeholders are pushing corporations to ensure responsibility toward the society and environment while working in their business [15]. Ownership structure is seen as an essential part in determining environmental and social involvement [16] because various types of owners may have different ways of thinking about CSR matters [17]. Following past studies, this relationship is backed by agency theory [11,14,18].
However, the literature has explored more about the effect of firm-specific characteristics [19,20], audit-committee attributes [21,22], and board structure [23,24] on CSR issues, whereas the nexus between ownership structure and CSR is still little examined [11,18]. In addition, developed countries are the focal point of most of the research relating to CSR matters in general and the influence of corporate governance on CSR performance in particular [25,26]. It is important to put more effort into this research field in developing economies where environmental and companies’ ethical matters are always a hot topic [27,28]. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effect of ownership structure, which are ownership concentration, managerial ownership, government ownership and foreign ownership, on CSR performance in the context of Vietnam through the lens of agency perspective.
The Vietnamese economy has significantly expanded since its vital reform named “Doi Moi’’ in 1986, with the main theme called the “market oriented socialist economy under state guidance”, and it has become a very attractive place for foreign investment. The country is now starting the stage of growing with sustainability even though the idea of and knowledge about CSR is relatively new [29,30].
Recently, the government has encouraged corporations to care about their social and environmental responsibilities through specific actions. For example, in 2015, the two Vietnamese stock exchanges, namely the HaNoi and Ho Chi Minh stock exchanges, participated in the Sustainable Stock Exchange (SSE) initiative, which commenced in 2009 and was directed by the Secretary General of the United Nations. The initiative aims to reinforce environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) performance and encourage sustainable investment around the world [29]. In 2021, the government had just approved the new National Green Growth Strategy for the period of 2021–2030 with a vision to 2050 of supporting sustainable growth of the whole economy. This Strategy is the one aimed at continuing and expanding the success of the first strategy regarding green growth which was announced in 2012 (Retrieved from https://en.baochinhphu.vn/national-green-growth-strategy-for-2021-2030-vision-towards-2050-11142515.htm, accessed on 1 May 2022).
By doing this, Vietnam has confirmed its commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations. In addition, the global economics integration process with many free trade agreements has urged Vietnamese companies to pay more attention to CSR issues while doing business with other countries because these agreements show concern for the environment and society. For instance, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) encourages sustainability growth and calls for a respect of international standards on environment protection and labor rights [31].
Therefore, ensuring a good CSR performance is vital for firms in Vietnam, and the nexus between ownership structure and CSR performance might be the key point for them to achieve this goal. To the best of our knowledge, there is scarce academic literature about this link in Vietnam, and within these limited papers, CSR disclosure taken from annual reports is mainly used in place of CSR performance [29,32] because it is more convenient to figure out CSR information from annual reports than doing the measurement for CSR performance in developing countries [33]. Thus, this study utilizes the CSR ratings from the CSRHub database as a measurement for CSR performance to deal with any difficulties encountered by prior research and to try to provide greater understanding about this relationship.
The remainder of this research is presented as follows: Section 2 outlines the theoretical background and builds the research hypotheses, Section 3 discusses the data, measurement of variables and estimation method, Section 4 exhibits empirical results, Section 5 provides conclusions, implications, limitations, and information about future work.

2. Theoretical Background and Hypotheses

Agency theory has been labelled as “a theory of ownership structure of the firm”. It describes the conflict in the principal (owners)–agent–(managers) relationship, which was caused by unaligned interests between them [34]. Moreover, these problems tend to be more complicated when the firm shareholder structure is more dispersed [35]. Desender [36] gives a similar explanation about how ownership structure can create agency problems. In practice, many owners from the dispersed-ownership corporations may not have enough power and incentives, due to their low level of shareholding, to monitor and evaluate the management team decisions while corporations with larger shareholders have better monitoring mechanisms to their business activities, which can mitigate agency problems [11,13]. This means that the level of ownership concentration can affect corporate decision-making which also includes decisions regarding CSR activities [13].
Managerial ownership is another structure that can alleviate agency costs and equalize the interests of the owners and managers [37]. Aligning these interests can help lead managers to focus more attention on value maximizing activities [38]. However, in some cases, managerial ownership can also be responsible for a drop in CSR investment because managers may want to avoid expenditures that reduce their own share value in the short term [14,39].
Professional owners, including foreign and government ownership, consider that CSR engagement can result in better chances for the company’s long-term survival [11]. Foreign shareholders have the capability to monitor the management team and then reduce the agency cost [40,41], and they often direct firms to care more about CSR activities [42]. In addition, government ownership can push the managers to reach non-financial targets, such as environmental and social matters related to government policy [43]. This governmental pressure can help to satisfy the interests of many different stakeholders, and therefore mitigate the agency problem between them and the CEOs [11].

2.1. Ownership Concentration

Ownership concentration describes the situation whereby a company’s shares are condensed in the pockets of a few large owners [44]. Prior research has examined the relationship between the concentration of equity ownership and CSR. Based on the explanation of agency conflicts, ownership concentration can have contrasting impacts on social and environmental issues. When owners possess a large number of shares in the firm, they are more inclined to monitor the managers [45]. As a result, these blockholders might put more focus on CSR practices because of their social reputation and the firm’s long-term development [46,47]. In contrast, if some large shareholders exploit their control, agency problems between minor and major shareholders may increase [48,49] as they can use this power to secure their own benefits at the minority owners’ expenses. In order to keep maximizing interests, CSR may not be their priority because it can raise the costs and shrink the profitability of the firm, so these owners would not be favorable to spending much on environmental and social issues [50,51]. Therefore, the concentration of shareholdings can theoretically lead to either positive or negative influences on CSR activities.
Empirical evidence has shown that concentrated equity ownership typically affects CSR, but there are insignificant results in some research as well [14]. Calza et al. [52] and Liu et al. [53] show that ownership concentration can significantly enhance environmental performance for European energy and Chinese manufacturing companies, respectively. Likewise, Aboud and Yang [54] confirm the positive association between the concentration of equity ownership and CSR performance. Therefore, according to the agency theory argument for a positive relationship, along with the empirical findings above, this paper postulates that:
Hypothesis 1 (H1).
Ownership concentration is positively associated with CSR performance.

2.2. Managerial Ownership

Managerial ownership is seen as an important factor in mitigating agency problems and aligning the different interests of owners and managers [37]. If the managers possess a considerable number of firm shares, they tend to act towards maximizing the shareholders’ value. This means that they will likely promote CSR engagement if it results in the improvement of the company’s value. In other words, managerial ownership can enhance environmental and social activities [18,55,56].
Another lens to look through at the relationship between managerial ownership and CSR is subject to short-term versus long-term orientation [18]. This relationship can be positively related in the long-term perspective with the view of CSR involvement strengthening the corporation’s value [13,57] because managers with their shareholdings in-hand might be motivated to focus on long-term firm value and thus engage more in CSR [13,58]. However, if managers pay more attention to the corporation’s short-term profits, which are linked to their benefits and other compensations, they might be prone to run the business in a way that is not in the best interest of all stakeholders. In this case, large managerial ownership can grant greater power in decision-making for their own interests. These managers may decide not to pursue CSR activities because their investment costs can far exceed the prospective benefits in some situations. Therefore, CSR engagement can shrink with a short-term orientation from the managers [18,39,59].
Empirical findings present mixed relationships, including positive, negative and not significant between managerial ownership and CSR performance [14]. Javeed and Lefen [60], and Cho and Ryu [61] are two of the studies advocating the positive link between the two variables. Hence, this research proposes the hypothesis below mainly based on the agency theory explanation:
Hypothesis 2 (H2).
Managerial ownership is positively associated with CSR performance.

2.3. Government Ownership

State-owned enterprises are more aware of all stakeholders’ interests in the society because their business is monitored by the public [44]. The government shareholders can put pressure on managers to give more consideration to important political and environmental related government policies when operating the business Therefore, a higher level of government ownership may lead to greater CSR proactivity in the company [62]. In addition, it is also necessary for firms with higher state ownership to be society-oriented because they need to be roles models in the business environment [63]. These corporations are expected to be socially responsible and serve for the good of the whole society [63]. Based on agency theory, state-owned firms tend to conform to government pressure [64], so they are seen to be more motivated to relieve agency issues among many different stakeholders in the community by resolving social and environmental matters through their spending on CSR [11].
Although existing empirical studies show contrasting results on the association between government shareholdings and CSR activities [29], the majority of research unveils a positive nexus [14,65]. Drawing from agency theory and prior empirical findings, this paper formulates the hypothesis below:
Hypothesis 3 (H3).
Government ownership is positively associated with CSR performance.

2.4. Foreign Ownership

A high level of foreign ownership is able to create more pressure on a firm’s management to contribute toward social matters [13] because foreign shareholders vary from the domestic ones in terms of familiarity, time horizons, preferences and the extent of information asymmetry [13,66]. In fact, foreign owners are seen to be more familiar with environmental and social activities thanks to their foreign market engagement [67]. In addition, they invest in the company with a long-term horizon perspective which counts on CSR proactivity as a tool to create an insurance-like effect for the firm’s long-term survival [66]. Lastly, foreign investors encounter greater information asymmetry due to geographical distance and incur a higher risk coming from overseas investment [68,69]. Since CSR involvement can help to alleviate information asymmetry and risk, these investors may think about putting their money into socially responsible corporations and to pressure them to act responsibly for the society [13,70].
Based on agency perspective, foreign shareholders are capable of monitoring management decisions through more control mechanisms, such as frequent reporting systems and sophisticated auditing procedures [11,40]. This results in reduced agency cost and enhanced performance in the company [41]. Moreover, these investors with their monitoring power often urge the corporation to have more concern on CSR issues [42]. Despite the fact that there are still inconsistent empirical findings in past studies regarding the nexus between foreign ownership and CSR, most of them unveil a positive association [11]. Hence, this work postulates the hypothesis below:
Hypothesis 4 (H4).
Foreign ownership is positively associated with CSR performance.

3. Data and Methodology

3.1. Data

This research initially gathered the Vietnamese firms’ CSR ratings at the beginning of October 2019 from the CSRHub database, which is a reliable data source recognized broadly by both researchers and practitioners in the CSR field [71,72], in order to study the impact of ownership structure on CSR performance. CSRHub synthesizes CSR information from many diverse sources of data and then delivers CSR scores/rankings for each company drawing on four main categories, including environment, community, employee and governance. Each category is given ratings ranging from 0 to 100.
According to Cruz et al. [72], these four categories can be sorted into two groups based on their relationship with different types of stakeholders within the firm: employee and governance are put together because they are linked to internal stakeholders, while community and environment are in the same group because they are both connected to external stakeholders. This study aims to examine the nexus between ownership structure and CSR performance. However, ownership structure is seen as one of the corporate governance mechanisms of a company, which is related to the governance category in the CSR measurement. In addition, CSRHub only generates the employee scores for a very limited number of Vietnamese firms. Hence, this research can only consider community and environment, categories both connected to external stakeholders, as the measurements for CSR performance. It cannot consider the employee and governance categories. The overall CSR rating is computed by averaging the community and environment scores.
This work assembled the ownership structure data at the beginning of October 2019 from website information and annual reports. Finally, firm age, profitability (ROA), leverage, market to book ratio (MB ratio) and industry were also placed in the research framework as the control variables [11,29]. To better represent some of the control variables, these data were taken from the financial report of 2018 instead of the third quarter financial report of 2019. Originally, there were 77 companies that had ratings for community and environment components at the beginning of October 2019 from CSRHub. In the end, the final sample included 65 Vietnamese firms after excluding 12 corporations for not having enough data for the independent and control variables.
There are three stock exchanges in Vietnam, including the Unlisted Public Company Market (UPCOM) for unlisted firms, and the HaNoi Stock Exchange (HNX) and the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HOSE) for listed firms. Among them, HOSE is the largest one with respect to capitalization, is much bigger than the other two, and is also the first exchange, established in 2000. Table 1 classifies the sample into the UPCOM, HNX and HOSE stock exchanges with 5, 14 and 46 companies, respectively. Moreover, there are 14 out of 46 HOSE firms belonging to the top 30 biggest corporations in this exchange (Retrieved from https://www.ssc.gov.vn, accessed on 20 May 2022).
With respect to the company’s industry as a control variable, the Industry Classification Benchmark (ICB) developed by Dow Jones and Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) is employed for firm industry classification. Then a dummy variable is used for statistical analysis. This paper codes 1 for environmentally sensitive industries corporations and 0 otherwise. Based on prior studies, oil and gas, utilities, basic materials and industrials are categorized as high environmental sensitivity industries. These industries tend to have more pressure from the society to engage in CSR activities in comparison to other industries [73].
ICB based industry classification for the sample is presented in Table 2 with financials being the largest observation industry (20 firms), and technology and consumer services being the equally smallest observation industries (1 firm each).

3.2. Methodology

The relationship between ownership structure and CSR performance was analyzed through the equation below
Yi = β0 + β1 OWNCONi + β2 MGOWNi + β3 GVOWNi + β4 FROWNi + β5 AGEi + β6 ROAi + β7 LVi + β8 MBi + β9 E_SENSi + εi
where Y represents CP, EP, and CSRP.
Table 3 outlines variable, mnemonic, role and measurement information. Community performance (CP), environment performance (EP) and CSR performance (CSRP) are dependent variables in the analysis. Although this paper only formulates hypotheses for the nexus between ownership structure and CSR performance, it is definitely meaningful when looking at the impact of ownership structure on each CSR component. The score for each component was gathered from the CSRHub database, whereas the overall CSR scores were calculated by taking the averages of the community and environment scores. Ownership structure represented by ownership concentration (OWNCON), managerial ownership (MGOWN), government ownership (GVOWN) and foreign ownership (FROWN) are independent variables and their measurements were pulled from the existing literature [2,38,74,75,76]. Lastly, the control variables were chosen and measured according to Hussain et al. [24], Zaid et al. [11] and Pham et al. [29]. This research used ordinary least squares (OLS) multiple regression and Stata 15 for analyzing the data.

4. Result and Discussion

4.1. Descriptive Statistics and Pearson Correlation

Table 4 displays the summary of descriptive results of the variables in this research framework. The average ratings for community, environment and CSR performance of the sample are 54.70, 55.56, 55.13, respectively. It is obvious that these average ratings are not really satisfactory and there is still room for improvement. Ownership concentration shows the mean of 53.06%, while managerial ownership has a result of 6.55% as its mean value. Regarding the types of investors, the average values of government and foreign ownership are fairly similar with 22.36% for the former and 23.49% for the latter. In reference to the control variables, the mean of firm age, ROA, leverage, and market to book ratio are 29.92, 6.60%, 52.57%, 1.70, respectively, and approximately 41.54% of the sample firms are operating in industries considered to be highly sensitive for the environment.
Table 5 exhibits the Pearson correlation between each pair of variables. Firstly, the results reveal that community, environment and CSR are strongly positively correlated among themselves which means these ratings in one company often go in the same direction. Secondly, managerial ownership has a positive correlation with all the CSR measurements. It is also important to note that foreign ownership is positively correlated with environment and the overall CSR. However, it has no correlation between ownership concentration, government ownership and all the CSR activities. Finally, with regard to the control variables, the table presents positive correlations between ROA, leverage and environment and community, respectively. In addition, industry also shows the same relationship, but with environment and CSR.
With respect to the multicollinearity checking for this data set, Table 5 shows that all the correlation coefficients among the independent and control variables are smaller than 0.8 and the variables’ Variance Inflation Factors (VIFs) are significantly lesser than 10 as well. Consequently, this study has no multicollinearity concern for the regression analysis [77].

4.2. Regression Results

The regression analysis for the link between ownership structure and CSR performance is presented in Table 6. The result reveals that managerial ownership (MGOWN) is positively and significantly related to community, environment and CSR at 10%, 1%, and 5% significance level, respectively, which affirms hypothesis 2. This empirical evidence is verified by the existing literature, for example, Garas and ElMassah [78], Javeed and Lefen [60] and Cho and Ryu [61], who acknowledge that higher managerial shareholdings mean better CSR engagement. This finding is also backed by agency theory, which suggests that having owned-shares managers is a useful approach to reducing agency issues by aligning the interests of managers and owners. Hence, these managers, with considerable firm shares in-hand, tend to be involved in social and environmental activities if it means an increase in value for the firm and shareholders [18].
In addition, foreign ownership (FROWN) is positively associated with all the CSR variables as well and it is significant at 10% for community, 5% for environment and 5% for CSR. Thus, hypothesis 4, stating that foreign ownership positively impacts CSR performance, is confirmed. Al-Gamrh et al. [66] confirm this result by showing that higher levels of foreign shareholdings are linked to better social performance in the UAE. Moreover, Guo and Zheng [79] also indicate the positive impact of foreign ownership on CSR in China. Agency theory provides an explanation for this result in that foreign investors can monitor the managers more effectively through their expertise [11] and they are likely to pressure the management team to participate in CSR issues [13]. By doing this, these investors help to enhance the social and environmental performance for the firm.
However, this study had to reject hypothesis 1 and 3, which formulate the positive effects of ownership concentration (OWNCON)and government ownership (GVOWN) on CSR performance, respectively, because of insignificant results between these independent and dependent variables. Despite the positive and negative significant nexus between ownership concentration, government ownership and sustainability performance in the prior literature [14,80], there are still studies showing no significant influence of ownership concentration [81,82] and government ownership [52,83] on CSR practices, which are listed in the back for the empirical findings of this work. For the former, there may be a need to identify who the large shareholders are in the company because different types of shareholders bring different impacts on CSR issues [14,44]. For the latter, the Vietnamese government is still in the early stages of building up the economy with sustainability, so its pressure is not very strict. Hence, companies, even those with high government ownership, do not necessarily integrate CSR matters into their strategic plan [29]. These could be the reasons why other studies have resulted in non-significance relationships.
With respect to the control variables, leverage (LV) relates to the community, whereas environmentally sensitive industries (E_SENS) affect the environment and CSR, and all the relationships are positive. Nevertheless, the rest of the controls do not show any significant effect on sustainable performance.

5. Conclusions

This paper contributes to the CSR research picture in several ways. Firstly, there are still few studies and the results are controversial regarding the vital role of ownership structure on the level of CSR activities. Therefore, this research examines the above link with ownership concentration, managerial ownership, government ownership, and foreign ownership representing the ownership structure. Companies in Vietnam, where CSR engagement is still in the early stages compared with developed countries, are chosen for this study analysis. In addition, CSRHub is utilized for the measurement of CSR performance whereas most works touching this topic in Vietnam employ CSR disclosures taken from annual reports because measuring CSR performance for companies in a developing country is often a complicated task.
As a result, managerial and foreign ownership exhibit positive relationships while ownership concentration and government ownership show no significant associations with CSR performance. Agency theory gives support for the positive links by acknowledging that higher managerial and foreign ownership lead to the alignment of the owners’ and managers’ interests and to a better monitoring mechanism of management decisions, respectively, which can strengthen the sustainability performance of one company. These findings offer some practical ideas and suggest that the corporations in Vietnam can either use high managerial shareholdings or attract more foreign investors as a tool to fulfill their responsibilities to different stakeholders, and that the government can also draw some important policies based on this implication.
Despite the contributions of this study to the literature, there are also limitations which remain for future research. Firstly, the paper was only able to retrieve information from 65 Vietnamese firms based on the availability of website information, annual reports and CSRHub, and this has limited the analysis to a small sample size and cross-section of data. Secondly, there is an exclusion of employee and governance, the other two components of CSR from CSRHub, due to a lack of data and the scope of this research, respectively, from the work. Finally, other important types of ownership in Vietnam, for example, institutional ownership, are not included in the analysis because of the difficulties in data collection [84] which might result in an insufficient exploration for the relationship between ownership structure and CSR performance. Future research may be able to figure out different methods or databases to use with the purpose of extending the sample, both in time-series data and size, and measuring CSR in full. Perhaps institutional ownership and other ownership structures could also be investigated to capture the whole picture of this research topic in Vietnam.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, C.-C.L. and T.P.N.; methodology, C.-C.L. and T.P.N.; software, T.P.N.; validation, C.-C.L. and T.P.N.; formal analysis, C.-C.L. and T.P.N.; investigation, C.-C.L. and T.P.N.; resources, C.-C.L.; data curation, T.P.N.; writing—original draft preparation, T.P.N.; writing—review and editing, C.-C.L. and T.P.N.; visualization, C.-C.L. and T.P.N.; supervision, C.-C.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Data were obtained from website information, annual reports and the CSRHub database. The data from CSRHub are available with the subscriptions.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Table 1. Stock exchange classification.
Table 1. Stock exchange classification.
ExchangeNo. of Companies
UPCOM5
HNX14
HOSE46 *
Total65
Note: * Within these 46 samples, 14 companies were included in the HOSE’s top. 30.
Table 2. Industry classification.
Table 2. Industry classification.
Industry Name (ICB) Environmental
Sensitivity
No. of FirmsPercentage
Consumer ServicesLow11.54%
Technology 11.54%
Health Care 46.15%
Consumer Goods1218.46%
Financials 2030.77%
Oil and GasHigh 23.08%
Utilities23.08%
Basic Materials 710.77%
Industrials1624.62%
Total 65100%
Table 3. Variable measurement.
Table 3. Variable measurement.
VariableMnemonicsRoleMeasurement
Community performanceCPDependentCSRHub
Environment performanceEPCSRHub
CSR performanceCSRP(CP + EV)/2
Ownership concentrationOWNCONIndependent Total proportion of shares held by shareholders who owned at least 5% of total shares
Managerial ownershipMGOWNProportion of shares owned by the CEO, both direct and indirect shareholdings, to the total number of outstanding shares of the firm
Government ownershipGVOWNProportion of shares owned by the government to the total number of outstanding shares of the firm
Foreign ownershipFROWNPercentage of shares held by the foreign investors to the total number of outstanding shares of the firm
Firm ageAGEControlLog of the number of years since the firm’s inception
ProfitabilityROARatio of net income and total assets (return on assets)
LeverageLVRatio of total debt to total assets
Market to book ratioMBRatio of market price to book value
Industry E_SENSDummy variable which receives the value of 1 if the company belonging to environmentally sensitive industries and 0 otherwise
Table 4. Descriptive statistics.
Table 4. Descriptive statistics.
Var.MeanSDMinMax
CP54.700013.086124.583.5
EP55.564113.204014.666780
CSRP55.132111.692423.833475.75
OWNCON53.056624.4568095.99
MGOWN6.553914.8773062.51
GVOWN22.358327.9375086.19
FROWN23.493521.4677088.72
AGE29.923113.7560861
ROA6.59757.0229−4.0628.4
LV52.574022.924610.5795.85
MB1.70291.66160.1310.65
E_SENS0.41540.496601
Table 5. Pearson correlation.
Table 5. Pearson correlation.
Var.CPEPCSRPOWNCONMGOWNGVOWNFROWNAGEROALVMBE_SENSVIF
CP1
EP0.582 ***1
CSRP0.888 ***0.891 ***1
OWNCON0.0260.0990.0701 1.89
MGOWN0.292 **0.226 *0.291 **−0.0701 1.28
GVOWN−0.1140.010−0.0590.603 ***−0.348 ***1 2.36
FROWN0.1900.281 **0.265 **−0.084−0.062−0.224 *1 1.31
AGE−0.0410.1500.0620.281 **−0.2060.409 ***0.0951 1.44
ROA0.0830.218 *0.1690.110−0.053−0.0900.379 ***0.247 **1 2.55
LV0.217 *−0.0900.0710.0640.0770.250 **−0.260 **0.119−0.478 ***1 1.51
MB−0.032−0.023−0.0310.370 ***−0.1060.1740.1000.301 **0.576 ***−0.1411 2.23
E_SENS0.1270.297 **0.238 *−0.033−0.0890.026−0.0520.0870.073−0.058−0.263 **11.26
Note: *** p < 0.01; ** p < 0.05; * p < 0.10.
Table 6. Regression results.
Table 6. Regression results.
Var. CPEPCSRP
OWNCON0.05790.03540.0466
(0.499)(0.673)(0.533)
MGOWN0.2302 *0.3055 ***0.2678 **
(0.051)(0.009)(0.010)
GVOWN−0.02840.06940.0205
(0.735)(0.399)(0.779)
FROWN0.1499 *0.1869 **0.1684 **
(0.069)(0.022)(0.020)
AGE−0.11110.0833−0.0139
(0.404)(0.523)(0.905)
ROA0.40290.22910.3160
(0.247)(0.500)(0.298)
LV0.2226 ***−0.01450.1041
(0.008)(0.856)(0.147)
MB−0.3701−0.6981−0.5341
(0.787)(0.603)(0.655)
E_SENS4.53527.9797 **6.2575 **
(0.190)(0.021)(0.041)
Constant34.9396 ***40.3749 ***37.6572 ***
(0.000)(0.000)(0.000)
R20.26360.30390.2963
Adjusted R20.14310.19000.1812
F statistic2.192.672.57
p value0.03690.01210.0151
Observations656565
Note: p value in parentheses; *** p < 0.01; ** p < 0.05; * p < 0.10.
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Lin, C.-C.; Nguyen, T.P. The Impact of Ownership Structure on Corporate Social Responsibility Performance in Vietnam. Sustainability 2022, 14, 12445. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141912445

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Lin C-C, Nguyen TP. The Impact of Ownership Structure on Corporate Social Responsibility Performance in Vietnam. Sustainability. 2022; 14(19):12445. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141912445

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Lin, Ching-Chung, and Tran Phuoc Nguyen. 2022. "The Impact of Ownership Structure on Corporate Social Responsibility Performance in Vietnam" Sustainability 14, no. 19: 12445. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141912445

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