Corporate Social Responsability: From Compliance to Opportunity?

This book presents a large overview of the research program on Corporate Social Responsibility initiated in 2007 by the Department of Economics of the Ecole Polytechnique. This program benefited from the support of the Department's two chairs: Chair for Business Economics and Chair for Sustainable Finance and Responsible Investment. This joint support provided an exceptional opportunity to unite the business and financial communities on issues of increasing importance to the society at large.

During the year 2009, workshops were organized to exchange on the ongoing research projects. Participants involved: institutional investors, pension funds, asset managers, rating agencies (Innovest, Vigeo...), public administrations, business companies (Danone, DuPont, Edf, Gdf-Suez, Kraft Food, Lafarge, Unilever...) and academics.

This book contains sixteen contributions organized in four parts:

• Governance and Financial Regulation: The Lessons from the Crisis
• Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Performance: Where Do We Stand?
• Firms and Sectoral Risks: Climate Change, Health and Nutrition
• Firms and the Communities: The Limits of Financial Performance.