Are corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives providing the societal good that they promise? After decades of CSR studies, we do not have an answer. In this review, we analyze progression of ...the CSR literature toward assessing the performance of CSR initiatives, identify factors that have limited the literature’s progress, and suggest a new approach to the study of CSR that can overcome these limits. We begin with comprehensive bibliometric mapping illustrating that although social impact has infrequently been its explicit focus, the CSR literature has measured outcomes other than firm performance, especially in the current decade. Thereafter, we conduct a more fine-grained analysis of recent CSR studies. Adapting a logic model framework, we show that even the most highly cited studies have stopped short of assessing social impact, often measuring CSR activities rather than impacts and focusing on benefits to specific stakeholders rather than to wider society. In combination, our analyses suggest that assessment of the performance of CSR initiatives has been driven by the availability of large, public secondary data sources. However, creating more such databases and turning to “big data” analyses are inadequate solutions. Drawing from the impact evaluation literature of development economics, we argue that the CSR field should reconceive itself as a science of design in which researchers formulate CSR initiatives that seek to achieve specific social and environmental objectives. In accordance with this pursuit, CSR researchers should move toward “small data” research designs, which will enable studies to better determine causation rather than just identify correlation.
Pricing Uncertainty Induced by Climate Change Barnett, Michael; Brock, William; Hansen, Lars Peter
Review of financial studies/The Review of financial studies,
03/2020, Volume:
33, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Geophysicists examine and document the repercussions for the earth’s climate induced by alternative emission scenarios and model specifications. Using simplified approximations, they produce ...tractable characterizations of the associated uncertainty. Meanwhile, economists write highly stylized damage functions to speculate about how climate change alters macroeconomic and growth opportunities. How can we assess both climate and emissions impacts, as well as uncertainty in the broadest sense, in social decision-making? We provide a framework for answering this question by embracing recent decision theory and tools from asset pricing, and we apply this structure with its interacting components to a revealing quantitative illustration.
Building on the theoretical argument that a firm's ability to profit from social responsibility depends upon its stakeholder influence capacity (SIC), we bring together contrasting literatures on the ...relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) to hypothesize that the CSP-CFP relationship is U-shaped. Our results support this hypothesis. We find that firms with low CSP have higher CFP than firms with moderate CSP, but firms with high CSP have the highest CFP. This supports the theoretical argument that SIC underlies the ability to transform social responsibility into profit.
Do firms benefit from their voluntary efforts to alleviate the many problems confronting society? A vast literature establishing a “business case” for corporate social responsibility (CSR) appears to ...find that usually they do. However, as argued herein, the business case literature has established only that firms usually benefit from responding to the demands of their primary stakeholders. The nature of the relationship between the interests of business and those of broader society, beyond a subset of powerful primary stakeholders, remains an open question despite this vast literature. This article develops a set of propositions that highlight constraints on firms’ ability to profit from CSR and outlines a set of managerial challenges on which researchers must focus their attention to truly determine whether and when firms can profit by responding to the needs of society.
Medicare penalizes hospitals with higher than expected readmission rates by up to 3% of annual inpatient payments. Expected rates are adjusted only for patients' age, sex, discharge diagnosis, and ...recent diagnoses.
To assess the extent to which a comprehensive set of patient characteristics accounts for differences in hospital readmission rates.
Using survey data from the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and linked Medicare claims for HRS participants enrolled in Medicare who were hospitalized from 2009 to 2012 (n = 8067 admissions), we assessed 29 patient characteristics from survey data and claims as potential predictors of 30-day readmission when added to standard Medicare adjustments of hospital readmission rates. We then compared the distribution of these characteristics between participants admitted to hospitals with higher vs lower hospital-wide readmission rates reported by Medicare. Finally, we estimated differences in the probability of readmission between these groups of participants before vs after adjusting for the additional patient characteristics.
All-cause readmission within 30 days of discharge.
Of the additional 29 patient characteristics assessed, 22 significantly predicted readmission beyond standard adjustments, and 17 of these were distributed differently between hospitals in the highest vs lowest quintiles of publicly reported hospital-wide readmission rates (P ≤ .04 for all comparisons). Almost all of these differences (16 of 17) indicated that participants admitted to hospitals in the highest quintile of readmission rates were more likely to have characteristics that were associated with a higher probability of readmission. The difference in the probability of readmission between participants admitted to hospitals in the highest vs lowest quintile of hospital-wide readmission rates was reduced by 48% from 4.41 percentage points with standard adjustments used by Medicare to 2.29 percentage points after adjustment for all patient characteristics assessed (reduction in difference: -2.12; 95% CI, -3.33 to -0.67; P = .003).
Patient characteristics not included in Medicare's current risk-adjustment methods explained much of the difference in readmission risk between patients admitted to hospitals with higher vs lower readmission rates. Hospitals with high readmission rates may be penalized to a large extent based on the patients they serve.
Few patients with opioid use disorder receive medication for addiction treatment. In 2017 the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act enabled nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) ...to obtain federal waivers allowing them to prescribe buprenorphine, a key medication for opioid use disorder. The waiver expansion was intended to increase patients' access to opioid use treatment, which was particularly important for rural areas with few physicians. However, little is known about the adoption of these waivers by NPs or PAs in rural areas. Using federal data, we examined waiver adoption in rural areas and its association with scope-of-practice regulations, which set the extent to which NPs or PAs can prescribe medication. From 2016 to 2019 the number of waivered clinicians per 100,000 population in rural areas increased by 111 percent. NPs and PAs accounted for more than half of this increase and were the first waivered clinicians in 285 rural counties with 5.7 million residents. In rural areas, broad scope-of-practice regulations were associated with twice as many waivered NPs per 100,000 population as restricted scopes of practice were. The rapid growth in the numbers of NPs and PAs with buprenorphine waivers is a promising development in improving access to addiction treatment in rural areas.
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