An Examination of Corporate Financial Performance Within Corporate Socially Responsible Standard & Poor 500 Companies

Many managers are failing to predict and respond to the evolutionary changes within their firm’s business environment. Some experts believe that any company not utilizing a corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy will lose customers, which will have a direct impact on the firm’s financial performance. Managers lack a clear understanding of the impacts of CSR strategies on corporate financial performance. The purpose of this quantitative multiple regression-based study was to examine what relationship existed between an organization’s CSR strategy and its financial performance. The conceptual frameworks for this research were stakeholder and triple bottom line theories. These frameworks were selected because of their emphasis on CSR implementation. The completed multiple regression analyses focused on S&P 500 companies’ relationship of debt to equity, return on assets, and net profit margins with CSR scores to determine if any association existed. Four CSR categories were utilized as independent variables based on CSRHub’s reporting: (a) community, (b) employee, (c) environment, and (d) governance. Results from this study found a nonsignificant relationship between CSR and the dependent variables of return on assets and net profit margin. Debt to equity provided a mixed significance level with the independent variables of employees and governance proving insignificant, while community and environment represented a significant relationship. This research has forwarded the understanding of both stakeholder and triple bottom line theory by focusing new CSR research into the direction of the positive relationships and away from those that show no significance. Organizations that focus their CSR policies towards community engagement will benefit from a reduction in debt to equity and will promote social change through increased community improvement

Unraveling Hydrophobic Interactions at the Molecular Scale Using Force Spectroscopy and Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Interactions between hydrophobic moieties steer ubiquitous processes in aqueous media, including the self-organization of biologic matter. Recent decades have seen tremendous progress in understanding these for macroscopic hydrophobic interfaces. Yet, it is still a challenge to experimentally measure hydrophobic interactions (HIs) at the single-molecule scale and thus to compare with theory. Here, we present a combined experimental simulation approach to directly measure and quantify the sequence dependence and additivity of HIs in peptide systems at the single-molecule scale. We combine dynamic single-molecule force spectroscopy on model peptides with fully atomistic, both equilibrium and nonequilibrium, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the same systems. Specifically, we mutate a flexible (GS)(5) peptide scaffold with increasing numbers of hydrophobic leucine monomers and measure the peptides' desorption from hydrophobic self-assembled monolayer surfaces. Based on the analysis of nonequilibrium work-trajectories, we measure an interaction free energy that scales linearly with 3.0-3.4 k(B)T per leucine. In good agreement, simulations indicate a similar trend with 2.1 k(B)T per leucine, while also providing a detailed molecular view into HIs. This approach potentially provides a roadmap for directly extracting qualitative and quantitative single-molecule interactions at solid/liquid interfaces in a wide range of fields, including interactions at biointerfaces and adhesive interactions in industrial applications