Economists Matt Kotchen of Yale University and Jon Jungbien Moon of Korea University find that corporations offset bad actions with good actions.
Justin Lahart describes their conclusions:
Using a database that monitors companies on about 80 of measures of social responsibility, they found that when companies engage in bad behavior – which they call Corporate Social Irresponsibility, or CSI – they offset it by engaging in Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR. Usually, the offsets occur within the same category – if a company does something seen as hurting the environment, it does something else that’s seen as helping the environment. … An exception is when companies’ corporate governance is the problem.
Read it here.