In this paper we investigate the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility performance (CSP) and firms' financial standingcorporate financial performance (CFP) in ten Global Industry Classification System (GICS) sectors. The analysis of each sector provides unique opportunity of finding these CSR actions which nowadays play the most important role. We use Thomson Reuters ASSET4 ratings in order to proxy the CSR behaviour of 2428 companies from all over the world in the period of 2009-2012. We find CSR actions' effects measured by value increase as well as transitory effect on earnings conditional upon the company's sector. Firstly, we prove that eco-efficiency investments are value destructors in 8 out 10 sectors. For corporate governance we find significant results only in three sectors with ambiguous characteristic. Despite of adding the third, social dimension we observe relatively lesser impact of CSR actions on firms' financial performance in case of four sectors.

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We examine the components of equity returns on the Polish capital market. To analyse the underlying complexity of returns we took into consideration the model designed by Leibowitz (1999). This model captures three factors: dividend yield, expected growth in earnings and expected change in price-to-earnings (PE) ratio. We applied this model to analyse the average discount/premium not only to particular shares but to market averages as well. Firstly, we examined the variation of PE across the companies (as adapted from Penman (1996)) to analyse the average rate of return and their striking distance of individual stocks from a ‘normal’ level. Then we checked the transitory earnings in the portfolios of high PE, whereby a fall in current earnings relative to sustainable level of earnings leads to a transitory high PE ratio. We expect that the effect of transience in current year earnings can be significant. Lastly, we analysed the individual companies in order to check what percentage of companies give a “correct” signal about future prospects.

The aim of the paper is to reveal how corporate social performance (CSP) affects market value and earnings capabilities of companies from banking industry: Banking Services and Investment Banking & Investment Services sub-industries in particular. For Banking Services, the research was extended to a link between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance (CSP-CFP) by classifying institutions into clusters based on a type of culture which dominates in a bank’s country of origin. Regression analysis was run on a unique dataset, which comprehensively captures the contextuality of CSP, measured with corporate governance, environmental and social characteristics. This research uses Refinitiv database of ESG Scores as CSP proxy for banks from all over the world in the period of 2009–2016. The results confirm that environmental performance and social performance have negative impact on CFP in banks and partly confirmed that governance performance has a positive impact on their CFP. This research proves that banks’ CSP performance and the CSP-CFP relationship differs with regard to the type of bank operations as well as the associated culture. This is an important conclusion for investors seeking to increase value of their holdings and bank management who wants to foster bank’s profitability through CSP-related decisions.

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