Mahoney and Roberts (2002)

Mahoney, Lois, and Robin Roberts. "Corporate Social and Environmental Performance and Their Relation to Financial Performance and Institutional Ownership: Empirical Evidence on Canadian Firms." Working paper (University of Central Florida), 2002.

Evaluates the impact of social responsibility on the financial performance (ROE and ROA) of 300 Toronto Stock Exchange firms for the years 1996 through 1999 (social ratings are from Michael Jantzi Research Associates). Data issues reduced overall sample size from 900 to 352. Using the same methodology as Waddock and Graves (1997) used on U.S. firms, finds that both environmental performance and international social performance have a significant relationship with ROA (p<.05 in both cases) and ROE (p<.10). Also found that environmental performance (p<0.05) was a correlated with institutional ownership, but the overall social performance had a negative correlation (p<.10).

Link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=305781