CSR Study: Companies Do Good to Correct for Bad Behavior

New study suggests that a key reason companies do good is to offset earlier wrongdoing.  Researchers looked at 15 years worth of information, through 2005, taken from the main reference work on corporate responsibility, and found that negative scores on the corporate-responsibility ledger one year, predicted positive scores the next. 

Industries in which the correlation was strongest included cars, chemistry and pharmaceuticals, aerospace, hotels and entertainment and finance.  Bad behavior in the categories of the environment, human rights, and community relations predicted subsequent good works in those same areas.