Corporate governance and corporate investment allocation: The moderating role of corporate social responsibility disclosure in Vietnamese listed firms
Abstract
Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractCorporate investment allocation is essential for sustainable firm growth, particularly in emerging markets where firms may shift resources between long-term productive assets and more flexible financial assets under conditions of agency conflicts, weak monitoring, and limited transparency. This study investigates how corporate governance affects real and financial investment in Vietnamese listed non-financial firms and examines whether corporate social responsibility disclosure moderates these relationships. The analysis is based on a balanced panel of 356 firms listed on the Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi stock exchanges during 2017–2024, yielding 2,848 firm-year observations. The study applies firm- and year-fixed-effects models with clustered standard errors and further addresses endogeneity through lagged-regressor specifications, fixed-effects instrumental-variable estimation, and two-step system generalized method of moments estimation. The results show that larger boards, higher board independence, and greater institutional ownership are associated with higher fixed-asset investment and lower financial investment, whereas chief executive officer duality and ownership concentration are associated with lower fixed-asset investment and higher financial investment. The moderating estimates indicate that corporate social responsibility disclosure strengthens these patterns. Among disclosing firms, the marginal effects of board size, board independence, and institutional ownership on fixed-asset investment increased to 0.556, 0.521, and 0.321, while their corresponding effects on financial investment declined to –0.496, –0.641, and –0.426. Overall, the findings indicate that stronger governance quality and more transparent corporate social responsibility disclosure can jointly improve the orientation and sustainability of corporate capital allocation in Vietnam.