Does Corporate Social Responsibility Enhance Return on Assets? Evidence from Manufacturing Firm in Nigeria

The empirical research into the impact of CSR on return on assets is confusing and far from conclusive. Also in most of the previous studies; economic performance covered a (commonly five year) period “surrounding” the CSR performance and/or social disclosure periods. To overcome these limitations, our paper assess the impact of CSR return on assets of manufacturing firms in Nigeria. The result showed that with CSR, corporate social responsibility had a positive and significant effect on return on assets of the manufacturing organizations while without CSR, the impact is negative and non-significant. The implication is that what companies spend on the development of society of interest may be related to return on equity but does not significantly detect increase/decrease in return on equity. This study thus posits that manufacturing organizations should concentrate evenly also on other elements which organization see mainly as major determinants of return on assets as the finding is showing an insignificant effect of CSR on ROA.