Does it pay to be socially responsible for construction companies?

Within the built environment, the Engineering and Construction (EC) compa-nies are very natural resource-intensive in terms of their business operations. In this paper, we focus on publicly listed EC companies and analyse the role of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities on their corporate financial per-formance. The analytical framework is built around the economic theory of pri-vate provision of public goods. A basic Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is used to empirically examine the testable hypothesis with a panel data comprising 17 major EC companies with monthly data over 2000-13. The results indicate that CSR activities can influence financial performance significantly after control-ling for the firm size variable. We make use of several measures of CSR activities to test robustness. The broad results are robust to a range of alternative model specifications.