Measuring Corporate Social Performance: An Efficiency Perspective

Aggregation of corporate social performance (CSP) metrics poses a major challenge to researchers and practitioners. This study provides a critical evaluation of current aggregation approaches and proposes a new methodology based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) to compute a CSP index. DEA is independent of subjective weight specifications and provides an efficiency index to benchmark the CSP of firms. Using CSP data from 2190 firms in three major industries from the Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini, Inc. database in 2007, our study presents the first application of the DEA model for CSP and ordinal data and opens up a new path for future empirical CSP research.