Does Media Attention Matter? The Mediating Role of CSR on Firm Performance in China

Abstract

With the increasing attention to CSR from all walks of life, enterprises are gradually strengthening the construction of social responsibility while developing. By combing through a large amount of research literature on CSR, media attention and financial performance and based on relevant theories, this study selects 478 listed companies in the manufacturing industry in Shanghai and Shenzhen A-shares from 2008 to 2022 as the study sample, and adopts a positivist paradigm to explore the impact of social responsibility fulfilment on corporate financial performance, and also use the sum of the number of headlines of media reports in the quantitative statistics of newspaper financial news and the quantitative statistics of online news in the Chinese Research Data Service Platform (CNRNS) as a key indicator to measure the intensity of media attention, and then explore the mediating role played by media attention in the impact of CSR on corporate financial performance. The empirical results show that CSR has a significant positive impact on corporate financial performance; corporate active fulfilment of social responsibility can attract more media attention; and media attention plays a partly mediating role in the relationship between social responsibility fulfilment and corporate financial performance. The findings of the study enrich the research on the relationship between CSR and financial performance, and help provide empirical evidence for managers to fulfil their social responsibility as well as to make daily business decisions, so as to promote enterprises to achieve the goals of sustainable development and performance improvement.