Corporate social responsibility: How much is enough? A higher dimension perspective of the relationship between financial and social performance

We investigate the nature of the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate financial performance (CFP) by examining how it changes across a third dimension that accounts for firm-specific factors. We propose a semi-latent specification of an endogenous control variable, which can, for the first time, explicitly identify, for each individual firm, the threshold level where the marginal impact of CSR on CFP turns positive. We provide empirical evidence that this threshold depends on the additional dimension and consequently, the previously reported U-shape seems to be an aggregation of relationships of differential magnitude and direction. This disaggregation fits the data better and therefore, we maintain that the addition of a higher dimension, along with the identification of the threshold level, can explain the conflicting results in the literature.

     

Fabrication of self-assembled monolayers exhibiting a thiol-terminated surface

We compare two different strategies for fabricating self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) exhibiting a thiol-terminated organic surface, which recently has attracted considerable interest with regard to the binding of metal, and in particular gold particles, to these organic surfaces. Results obtained by IR spectroscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) reveal that the straightforward approach, namely, using the corresponding organodithiols, typically leads to the formation of disordered, ill-defined surfaces. We demonstrate that high-quality organothiolate adlayers exhibiting an SH-terminated surface can be prepared using dithiols where one of the thiol groups is protected by a thioester group. After formation of the organothiolate adlayer, the protecting group can be removed by immersion into NaOH solution. IR spectra recorded for the deprotected organothiolate adlayer reveal the presence of a highly oriented organothiolate adlayer.