Correlation between the Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Performance of the Bank in Ukrainian Context

The concept of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been developed since the first part of the XX century by many world known economists. Importance and significance of the CSR for all kinds of firms, banks and corporations became obvious many years ago. Hundreds of scientific papers were made on this topic, but still even nowadays the links between CSR and corporate financial performance (CFP) of the company are not clear and form a question for discussions. Especially interesting this problem appears in the banking sector, where it has its own specific. Banking institutions have implemented the CSR concept among the first, but the last financial crisis questioned the effectiveness of the banking CSR policy and its influence on the financial performance of the banks.This paper is aimed to make an attempt in finding correlation between CSR and financial performance on the example of the Ukrainian banking system. We have analyzed resident and non-resident banks which operate on Ukrainian market. The analysis was based on hypotheses proposed in the paper about correlation of CSR and CFP of the bank and separate indicators of the CSR such as the presence of independent directors, committees of the Board and code of conduct, expenditures on employees and some indexes of bank performance. Statistical analysis showed no clear link between CSR and CFP of the bank in general and between separate indicators of the CSR policy and efficiency of bank's activity as well