An Economic View of Corporate Social Impact /
Hunt Allcott, Giovanni Montanari, Bora Ozaltun, Brandon Tan.
- Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2023.
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- NBER working paper series no. w31803 .
- Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w31803. .
October 2023.
The growing discussions of impact investing and stakeholder capitalism have increased interest in measuring companies' social impact. We conceptualize corporate social impact as the welfare loss that would be caused by a firm's exit. To illustrate, we quantify the social impacts of 74 firms in 12 industries using a new survey measuring consumer and worker substitution patterns combined with models of product and labor markets. We find that consumer surplus is the primary component of social impact (dwarfing profits, worker surplus, and externalities), suggesting that consumer impacts deserve more attention from impact investors. Existing ESG and social impact ratings are essentially unrelated to our economically grounded measures.
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Welfare Economics Labor Demand Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets Automobiles • Other Transportation Equipment • Related Parts and Equipment Food • Beverages • Cosmetics • Tobacco • Wine and Spirits Mining, Extraction, and Refining: Hydrocarbon Fuels Retail and Wholesale Trade • e-Commerce Air Transportation Corporate Culture • Diversity • Social Responsibility Climate • Natural Disasters and Their Management • Global Warming