Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on firm performance in six Latin American economies. Firm performance comprises the following five distinct dimensions: firm turnover, labour productivity, innovativeness, product differentiation and technological transfer. The countries under scrutiny are Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico. Design/methodology/approach-Propensity Score Matching techniques are employed to identify the causal effect of CSR on firm performance. To this end, the World Bank Enterprise Survey (2006 wave) is employed. This dataset collects relevant firm-level data Findings-CSR has a positive impact on the outcome variables analysed, suggesting that corporate goals are compatible with conscious business operations. The results also vary across countries. Research limitations/implications-The pattern that emerges from the analysis seems to suggest that the positive effects of CSR depend on a country's stage of industrialisation. In particular, the less developed the economy, the wider the scope of CSR. Nonetheless, the relationship among conscious business operations, firm performance and countries' levels of development is not directly tested in the present work. Practical implications-The main practical implication of the study is that Latin American firms should adopt CSR. This is because corporate responsible practices either improve firm performance or are not shown to have a detrimental effect. Social implications-The major policy implication is that emerging countries' governments as well as international organisations should provide meaningful incentives for CSR adoption. Originality/value-The paper makes three major original contributions. First, it furnishes new descriptive evidence on CSR practices in Latin America. Second, it employs a broader and novel definition of firm performance intended to capture business dynamics in developing countries, as well as to overcome data limitations. Finally, it reassesses and extends the empirical evidence on the impact of CSR on firm performance.

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To explain a so-called “happiness gap” between citizens of Eastern Europe and comparable individuals from other regions, researchers have pointed at low governance quality, and corruption in particular, as a possible cause. However, this explanation seems incompatible with the “broken windows” paradigm, which posit that in high-corruption environment, victims of corruption tend to report a lower psychological cost of victimisation. Our paper contributes to the literature by explicitly tackling this potential contradiction. Our results nuance our understanding of the role of corruption on people’s life satisfaction in Eastern Europe by investigating the extent to which the subjective cost of corruption depends on its pervasiveness. We demonstrate: (1) large individual cost associated with different measures of corruption, (2) a small reduction in these costs for some measures of corruption as it becomes more pervasive and (3) large inequalities in the cost of corruption depending on education and income. Overall, we conclude that, for the population as a whole, there is limited evidence of corruption being a social norm in Eastern Europe, in the sense that pervasiveness does not reduce individual cost.

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Individualistic values are often presented as promoting economic development; however, their links to relevant behaviour and preferences at the micro-level remain under-explored. Here we investigate the relationship between individualistic values and personal attitudes towards reporting corruption. Unlike much of the previous research which focuses on attitudes towards corruption, we analyse the micro-level mechanisms relating to one's willingness to escape the status quo and act against corruption. We also focus on a region associated with persistently high levels of perceived corruption. Our findings indicate that individualism is associated with a greater likelihood to act against corruption. The effect estimated is small but highly significant and robust to changes in estimators and specifications. We also find evidence that institutional trust and individualism strengthen each other to generate greater willingness to report corruption.