Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons^™

The Living Wage As A Means To Address Social Inequality, Kent Walker Dr., Curtis Labutte

Odette School of Business Publications

The living wage is a call to private and public sector employers to pay wages to both direct and contract employees sufficient to provide the basics to individuals. This wage reflects the belief that every individual has the right to enjoy good health, recreation, culture and entertainment, to raise children, and to fully partake in social and civic activities, as opposed to minimally surviving. This movement is growing across Canada and the world.

Broadly, the case discusses social inequality, and more narrowly, it examines the Living Wage in Canada, then Ontario, then within one Ontario city, Windsor. The case describes …

New Belgium Brewing Company And B Corporation Certification, Kent Walker Dr., Taylor Laporte

Odette School of Business Publications

This case discusses the American craft-brewing company New Belgium Brewing (NBB), where the director of sustainability, Katie Wallace, must decide whether to invest significant company resources into becoming a B Corp certified company. More specifically, she must present her recommendation to the board of directors and to employees who are also shareholders. B Corporation is part of a non-profit organization encouraging sustainable business similar to LEED certification for construction or Fair Trade certification for coffee and chocolate. The idea behind B Corp certification is to use the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.

New Belgium Brewing has …

The Angel-Halo Effect: How Increases In Corporate Social Responsibility And Irresponsibility Relate To Firm Performance, Kent Walker Dr., Zhou Zhang, Bing Yu

Odette School of Business Publications

Purpose – To examine how increases in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) relate to firm performance. Further, we investigate how increases in CSR (CSiR) while CSiR (CSR) is present relate to three measures of firm performance: profitability, management efficiency, and market valuation.

Design/methodology/approach - Using over 10,000 observations from 2009-2013 and combined data from Sustainalytics and Compustat we examine how increases in either CSR or CSiR relate to firm performance.

Findings - We find that increased CSR significantly relates to increased firm performance in all three measures, and that increased CSiR significantly relates to decreased …