A variety of stakeholders including investors, corporate managers, customers, suppliers, employees, researchers, and government policy makers have long been interested in the relationship between the financial performance of a corporation and its commitment to business ethics. As a subject of research, the relations between business ethics and corporate valuation has yet to be thoroughly quantified and investigated. This article is an effort to amend this inadequacy by demonstrating a statistically significant association between ethical commitment and corporate valuation measures. Consistent with (...) anecdotal evidence, we have found a significant association between the ethical commitment of Korean companies and their valuation on the Korean stock market. However, the result reveals that the association between ethical commitment and financial performance is not significantly supported. (shrink)

While there are many studies that address how well Japanese companies have adopted explicit CSR practices, our understanding of their own views on such practices is still limited, particularly of the difference in their views before and after the process of making implicit CSR explicit. The present research thus aims to address this apparent change by providing comparative case studies of two Japanese companies selected from two different time periods. The findings indicate there is a continuity observable in the mindset (...) of these companies not a change. This contradicts existing literature and suggests that the process of making CSR explicit has not been accompanied by any real change in their mindset. The result shows that ethically questionable practices have been going on behind the explicitly articulated CSR policies and implies the difficulties of delegating the power to address societal issues to business organisations. This is important particularly now when the expectations of the public regarding the responsibilities of business towards society are on the rise. (shrink)