Evidence exploring the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and corporate financial performance (CFP) is consistently inconsistent, if not outright contradictory. We assert that much of this confusion is due to a failure to integrate both firm internal performance and the external environment into theoretical and empirical analyses of the effect of CSR disclosure on firm efficiency. This paper attempts to bring these two facets together in an examination of banking sector efficiency in a situation where the entire external environment is in flux, namely transition. Using a database of 319 banks from 21 transition countries, and using dynamic panel and quantile regressions, we provide empirical evidence that banks in transition countries saw benefits in firm performance only when CSR activities were layered on top of a strategy which already was profitable. Indeed, once profitability was achieved, only then did CSR disclosure begin to confer a competitive edge in developing firm resources. However, the external environment continues to exert an influence, and even where banks met profitability goals, predatory institutions can still make engaging in CSR a detriment to competitive advantage.

探索企业社会责任（CSR）披露与企业财务绩效（CFP）之间关系的证据即使不是完全矛盾，也始终不一致。我们断言，这种混乱很大程度上是由于未能将企业内部绩效和外部环境纳入企业社会责任披露对企业效率影响的理论和实证分析中。本文试图将这两个方面结合起来，考察整个外部环境不断变化（即转型）的情况下银行业的效率。通过使用来自 21 个转型国家的 319 家银行的数据库，并使用动态面板和分位数回归，我们提供了经验证据，表明只有当企业社会责任活动置于已经盈利的战略之上时，转型国家的银行才能看到公司绩效的好处。事实上，只有实现盈利后，企业社会责任披露才开始赋予公司资源开发方面的竞争优势。然而，外部环境继续产生影响，即使银行实现了盈利目标，掠夺性机构仍然可能使参与企业社会责任损害竞争优势。