Empirical study on corporate social responsibility in United Arab Emirates

Abstract

Recently the concern about the corporate social responsibility activities which the organizations provide to their society and stakeholders increased as a result of the globalization syndrome (Chapple & Moon, 2005). This study attempts to provide empirical evidence on the influence of the recent financial crisis on the disclosure of CSR among local banks in the United Arab Emirates. It also attempts to investigate the extent of CSR disclosure by these banks. Therefore, the study examined the annual reports of the local banks in the UAE for three different years. These years are 2007, 2009 and 2011. In addition, this study investigated the factors which influence the extent of CSR disclosure under three different categories which are, corporate governance factors (independent non-executive directors, the number of the board of directors), ownership structure factors (ownership concentration and government ownership), and the bank characteristics variables as control variables (size of the bank, profitability and leverage ratio). Furthermore, the study formulated eight null hypotheses based on four theories which are agency theory, signalling theory, legitimacy theory and proprietary cost theory. The annual reports were used for this study. Analysis of the collected data was done by conducting t-test and multiple-regression using SPSS version 20. The t-test was used to examine the extent of CSR before and after the financial crisis while the multiples-regression revealed the relationship between the dependent variable and independent variables