Taxation and The Crowding-Out Effect of Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

JEL Classification: H21, H32, H41 We address in this paper the issue of the existence or not of a crowding-out effect of Corporate Social Responsability by government intervention through a lump sum tax. For this purpose, we build a model of impur altruism for firms. We show that in general it will happen to be that public policy crowds out corporate (private) contribution but the crowding-out will not be complete. Two interesting findings are that i) the intensity of the crowding-out depends upon the relative performance of the government in producing the public good and ii) that public policy has an impact on wages in the economy since it is the opportunity cost for firms that spend time on Corporate Social Responsibility.