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Corporate philanthropy and community involvement. Analysing companies from France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain

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Abstract

This paper analyses the philanthropic behaviour of companies listed on four stock markets: the IBEX 35 (Spain), CAC-40 (France), DAX-30 (Germany) and AEX-25 (Netherlands). A bibliometric method was used to obtain keywords related to corporate philanthropy in literature, while a qualitative content analysis was undertaken to obtain specific philanthropy-related words from company annual reports. 19 groups of words (codes) were defined, indicating the terms used by companies to express corporate philanthropy and community involvement, the forms they use to express such involvement, and the formulas chosen to channel their aid. The word analysis also gave information about the stakeholders that companies take into account when they become involved in community issues. Different hypotheses were stated to determine whether the use of words was related to country, firm size (revenues and employees) or industry. The use of probit regression also allowed us to obtain combinations of these variables that explained the probability of using every term together but not separately. The results indicated that the variables which most affected philanthropic codes were country and revenues. Conversely, the variables which least influenced philanthropic codes were number of employees and industry.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, Universitat Politècnica de València, València, Spain

    Blanca de-Miguel-Molina

  2. Department of Applied Statistics and Operational Research, and Quality, Universitat Politècnica de València, València, Spain

    Vicente Chirivella-González

  3. Programme in Business Management, Universitat Politècnica de València, València, Spain

    Beatriz García-Ortega

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  1. Blanca de-Miguel-Molina
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  2. Vicente Chirivella-González
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Correspondence to Blanca de-Miguel-Molina.

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de-Miguel-Molina, B., Chirivella-González, V. & García-Ortega, B. Corporate philanthropy and community involvement. Analysing companies from France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. Qual Quant 50, 2741–2766 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-015-0287-9

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