The Challenge of Measuring Corporate Social Irresponsibility

In this paper, we develop a family of indexes to measure the social irresponsibility of firms. We define corporate social irresponsibility (CSIR) on the basis of firms’ alleged involvement in human rights abuses. After a critical appraisal of the existing CSIR raw data and measures/indexes, we take a M-quantile regression approach to develop a family of CSIR indexes that overcome the limitations of existing measures. We apply our methodology to a sample of 380 large publicly-listed firms, observed over the period 2004-2012. Our analysis develops a family of CSIR indexes robust to firms’ media exposure, size and industry specificities, and provides a measure of their accuracy