Corporate Social Responsibility and Profit Shifting

This paper studies the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and profit shifting. Using a profit-shifting measure derived from worldwide data for parent firms and their foreign subsidiaries, we find that corporate social responsibility is positively and significantly associated with profit shifting, consistent with the legitimacy theory and a risk-management strategy. Such a positive relationship is more pronounced in parent firms located in countries under the territorial tax system and in countries where product boycotting is more prevalent. Our findings are robust to a battery of sensitivity and endogeneity tests. Overall, our evidence suggests that multinational firms with higher CSR scores shift larger amounts of profits to their low-tax foreign subsidiaries, potentially indicating strategic planning in the choice of CSR investments by multinational enterprises.