Walking the Talk? Exploring the Relationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure and Green Building Performance of Chinese Listed Real Estate Companies

Real estate companies disclose information regarding their corporate social responsibility to either show their good citizenship in the social contexts or achieve legitimacy. This disclosure behavior is often viewed as an additional investment or even a greenwash practice- a “talk” practice. Green building practices, on the other hand, could be regarded as one kind of social responsibility practices- “walk” practices, which are largely associated with operations. This study tries to link the two kinds of practices to see whether companies “walk the talk” and figure out the logic underlying this link. Data were collected from the disclosure database, green building database, and corporate social responsibility reports of real estate companies. The green building data, which are project-level, were firstly matched to the corporate level. Panel data analysis was then applied to explore the relationships. The relationship was found to be non-significant, which implies an inconsistency between corporate social responsibility disclosure and green building practices for Chinese real estate companies. This research provides a starting point to incorporate CSR or CSR disclosure into the vain of green building and helps real estate companies better implement green building.