This paper devises management and accounting tools for monitoring bank performance. We first propose a multidimensional efficiency measure that integrates credit risk and is adapted to the real banking technology. Second, traditional accounting ratios complement the analysis. Third, the impact of different risk measures over efficiency and accounting ratios is shown. Fourth, we examine the effect of CEO turnover on future performance. An empirical application considers a unique dataset of Costa Rican banks during 1998-2007. Results reveal that performance improvements follow regulatory changes and that risk explains differences in performance. Non-performing loans negatively affect efficiency and return on assets, whereas the capital adequacy ratio positively affects the net interest margin. This supports that incurring monitoring costs and having higher levels of capitalisation may enhance performance. Finally, results confirm that appointing CEOs from outside the bank significantly improves performance, thus suggesting the potential benefits of new organisational practices.

This paper investigates whether, and how, firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance influences the auditor's assessment of the risk of material misstatement, whether due to fraud or error, at the financial statement level by analysing their pricing decision (i.e., audit fees). Using a panel data set of 12,330 firms from 28 countries over the period 2003-2012 and different measures of CSR performance, we find a U-shaped relationship between firms' CSR performance and audit fees. This result suggests that there is an optimal level of CSR performance that minimizes the auditor's assessment of the risk of material misstatement, which in turn lowers the need for greater auditor effort; that is why auditors charge firms significantly less when their CSR performance is at the optimal level. Finally, we also show that the optimal level of CSR performance varies with the degree of environmental dynamism, ownership concentration and leverage.

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Research summary Drawing on the “varieties of capitalism” literature, we develop an actor‐centered framework that explains firm‐level corporate social performance (CSP) by emphasizing the importance of considering owners' and other stakeholders' motives toward CSP—which can be instrumental, relational or moral—and their salience in the national institutional setting. Results from an international panel show that investment company (government) ownership has a stronger negative (positive) relationship with CSP in liberal markets, in which owners are the key stakeholder, as compared to coordinated markets, which counterbalance the interests of multiple stakeholders. Family and company ownership have weaker links to CSP across institutional settings. We discuss implications for research and practice and argue that CSP policies may hold more relevance in liberal rather than coordinated market economies. Managerial summary Existing debates focus on the impact of corporate social performance (CSP) on firm outcomes. Less is known about the motives and pressures behind CSP, which may explain its variability across firms and institutional settings. We argue that powerful owners' motives are important for explaining CSP in liberal markets, where shareholders are the most important stakeholder, as compared to coordinated markets, which confer prominence to multiple stakeholders. Owners' motives are not homogenous and depending on the type of owners the link between ownership concentration and CSP can be negative (for investment companies) or positive (for governments). In coordinated markets, owners have a weaker impact on CSP, which is mostly attributable to their lower salience relative to stakeholders, rather than to a change in their motives.