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This paper analyzes the economics of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), as a private response to market imperfections in order to satisfy social preferences. Depending on whether they affect regulation, competition or contracts, market imperfections driving CSR decisions are classified in three categories: public goods and bads and altruism; imperfect competition; and incomplete contracts. We successively present these drivers of CSR decisions and highlight the nature of incentives (external or internal) at work and the testable (and tested) hypotheses in the reviewed studies. We finally review the link between CSR and financial performance, as well as between CSR and social and environmental performance. A twofold discrepancy appears in the literature, opening future research paths: a disconnection between our understanding of CSR drivers and CSR impacts; and a knowledge gap between CSR financial and social consequences, the latter having received little attention.

Corporate sustainability has gone mainstream, and many companies have taken meaningful steps to improve their own environmental performance. But while corporate political actions such as lobbying can have a greater impact on environmental quality, they are ignored in most current sustainability metrics. It is time for these metrics to be expanded to critically assess firms based on the sustainability impacts of their public policy positions. To enable such assessments, firms must become as transparent about their corporate political responsibility (CPR) as their corporate social responsibility (CSR). For their part, rating systems must demand such information from firms and include evaluations of corporate political activity in their assessments of corporate environmental responsibility.

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