CSR as a Systemic Buffer Against External Disruption: Panel Evidence on COVID-19 Resilience and Firm Performance in Korean-Listed Firms

Background: Whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) helps firms withstand external disruption, and how any advantage evolves as a shock unfolds, remains unresolved. Drawing on stakeholder theory, conservation of resources theory, and a systems-resilience perspective, we set out two competing predictions for the acute phase of COVID-19: an insurance-based loss-mitigation view and a resource-premium view. Methods: We use a balanced panel of 100 KOSPI-listed non-financial firms observed annually from 2016 to 2024 (900 firm-year observations) and estimate two-way fixed-effects difference-in-differences and event-study models, classifying firms by pre-crisis (2016–2019) CSR and clustering standard errors by firm. Results: Firms with higher pre-crisis CSR show a positive return-on-assets differential that appears in 2020, is statistically clear from 2021, and persists through 2024 without attenuating, although the recovery-phase differential is not statistically larger than the acute-phase differential. Each ESG sub-dimension is associated with the post-COVID-19 differential when examined separately, but only governance remains so when all three are included jointly. Conclusions: The estimates describe differential performance trajectories associated with pre-crisis CSR status rather than causal effects, and the design cannot identify the mechanism. The persistence pattern is somewhat more consistent with a resource-premium than a loss-mitigation view.