Abstract
During the last years, citizens and transparency initiatives put increasing pressure on governments, organizations, and companies to be more transparent and to publicize information pertaining to their operations. Although several organizations have started engaging in open data practices, data quality, structure and availability is still highly inconsistent across organizations, which makes it challenging and effort-intensive to obtain and analyze large-scale high-quality datasets. To this end, this paper examines how publicly available financial and corporate data can be leveraged to extract useful inferences regarding the financial and social performance of companies. Numerous reports have been collected from the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and analyzed to study hypotheses regarding the corporate practices and social responsibility of companies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
XBRL (https://www.xbrl.org/) is a global standard for business reporting that allows the digitization of financial statements.
- 2.
- 3.
A 10-K is a comprehensive summary report of a company’s performance that must be submitted annually to the SEC.
- 4.
Newsweek, an American news magazine, publishes yearly rankings for the 500 largest publicly-traded US companies based on their overall environmental performance. For 2016, those are available on http://www.newsweek.com/green-2016.
- 5.
- 6.
The Document Object Model (DOM) is a programming interface for HTML and XML documents.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
References
Bauman, C.W., Skitka, L.J.: Corporate social responsibility as a source of employee satisfaction. Res. Organ. Behav. 32, 63–86 (2012)
Bowen, H.R., Johnson, F.E.: Social Responsibility of the Businessman. Harper, New York City (1953)
Bragdon, J., Marlin, J.: Is pollution profitable? Risk Manag. 19(4), 9–18 (1972)
Cai, Y., Jo, H., Pan, C.: Doing well while doing bad? CSR in controversial industry sectors. J. Bus. Ethics 108(4), 467–480 (2012)
Carroll, A.B.: Corporate social responsibility: evolution of a definitional construct. Bus. Soc. 38(3), 268–295 (1999)
Cheng, B., Ioannou, I., Serafeim, G.: Corporate social responsibility and access to finance. Strateg. Manag. J. 35(1), 1–23 (2014)
Dahlsrud, A.: How corporate social responsibility is defined: an analysis of 37 definitions. Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Manag. 15(1), 1–13 (2008)
Dyreng, S.D., Lindsey, B.P., Thornock, J.R.: Exploring the role delaware plays as a domestic tax haven. J. Financ. Econ. 108(3), 751–772 (2013)
Eckbo, B.E., Nygaard, K., Thorburn, K.S.: Does gender-balancing the board reduce firm value? (2016)
Ferrara, E., De Meo, P., Fiumara, G., Baumgartner, R.: Web data extraction, applications and techniques: a survey. Knowl.-Based Syst. 70, 301–323 (2014)
Johnston, K.A., Beatson, A.T.: Managerial conc1eptualisation of corporate social responsibility: an exploratory study (2005)
Laplante, S.K., Nesbitt, W.L.: The relation among trapped cash, permanently reinvested earnings, and foreign cash. J. Corp. Financ. 44, 126–148 (2017)
Loughran, T., McDonald, B., Yun, H.: A wolf in sheeps clothing: the use of ethics-related terms in 10-k reports. J. Bus. Ethics 89, 39–49 (2009)
Bromiley, P., Marcus, A.: The deterrent to dubious corporate behavior: profitability, probability and safety recalls. Strateg. Manag. J. 10(3), 233–250 (1989)
Margolis, J.D., Elfenbein, H.A., Walsh, J.P.: Does it pay to be good? A meta-analysis and redirection of research on the relationship between corporate social and financial performance. Ann Arbor 1001, 48109–1234 (2007)
Marr, C., Highsmith, B.: Tax holiday for overseas corporate profits would increase deficits, fail to boost the economy, and ultimately shift more investment and jobs overseas. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, D.C. (2011)
Mills, R., et al.: WikiRate.org – leveraging collective awareness to understand companies’ environmental, social and governance performance. In: Bagnoli, F., Satsiou, A., Stavrakakis, I., Nesi, P., Pacini, G., Welp, Y., Tiropanis, T., DiFranzo, D. (eds.) INSCI 2016. LNCS, vol. 9934, pp. 74–88. Springer, Cham (2016). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-45982-0_7
Moir, L.: What do we mean by corporate social responsibility? Corp. Gov.: Int. J. Bus. Soc. 1(2), 16–22 (2001)
Namkung, Y., Jang, S.: Are consumers willing to pay more for green practices at restaurants? J. Hosp. Tour. Res. 41(3), 329–356 (2017)
Parguel, B., Benoît-Moreau, F., Larceneux, F.: How sustainability ratings might deter greenwashing: a closer look at ethical corporate communication. J. Bus. Ethics 102(1), 15 (2011)
SEC: Interactive data to improve financial reporting, June 2017. https://www.sec.gov/rules/final/2009/33-9002.pdf
Sethi, S.P.: A conceptual framework for environmental analysis of social issues and evaluation of business response patterns. Acad. Manag. Rev. 4(1), 63–74 (1979)
Waddock, S.A., Graves, S.B.: The corporate social performance-financial performance link. Strateg. Manag. J. 18(4), 303–319 (1997)
Wanderley, L.S.O., Lucian, R., Farache, F., de Sousa Filho, J.M.: CSR information disclosure on the web: a context-based approach analysing the influence of country of origin and industry sector. J. Bus. Ethics 82(2), 369–378 (2008)
Wayne, L.: How delaware thrives as a corporate tax haven. N.Y. Times 30 (2012). http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/business/how-delaware-thrives-as-a-corporate-tax-haven.html
Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the WikiRate and ChainReact projects, partially funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP7-609897 and H2020-687967 respectively.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gkatziaki, V., Papadopoulos, S., Diplaris, S., Kompatsiaris, I. (2017). Large-Scale Open Corporate Data Collection and Analysis as an Enabler of Corporate Social Responsibility Research. In: Kompatsiaris, I., et al. Internet Science. INSCI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10673. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70284-1_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70284-1_21
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-70283-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-70284-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)