Paper on CSR index of the Ukrainian banks in SSRN’s top list

Last week researchers from the Virtus Global Center for Corporate Governance received a message from Michael C. Jensen, Chairman of Social Science Research Network informing that paper titled “CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY INDEX FOR UKRAINIAN BANKS: THE ESSENTIALS FOR IMPLEMENTATION” and coauthored by Alex Kostyuk, Helen Kostyuk, Yaroslav Mozghovyi and Yana Kravchenko was recently listed on SSRN’s Top Ten download list for: ERN: Index Numbers & Aggregation (Topic), ERN: Other Institutions & Transition Economics: Firm Governance (Topic), ERN: Other Institutions & Transition Economics: Macroeconomic Issues (Topic), Institutions & Transition Economics: Firm Governance eJournal and Institutions & Transition Economics: Macroeconomic Issues eJournal.

The aim of this paper is to solve the problem of CSR performance measurement for Ukrainian banking institutions by developing a CSR index. It is done by measuring a corporate social responsibility (CSR) through 25 different indicators for 40 Ukrainian banks, which represent 80% of total banking system assets. This paper is a first attempt in Ukrainian practice to put CSR indicators into a standard metrics and develop specific methodology that would allow comparing CSR for different banks. To check the adequacy of our preliminary findings we compare CSR results for Ukrainian banks with CSR results for Swedish banks, where the level of CSR is definitely higher, since it is a socially directed developed economy. After that the weights of CSR index for Swedish banks counted by our methodology was compared to different professionally made indexes.

The paper can be downloaded here.