**5. Conclusions**

Companies pursuing corporate social responsibility policies have realized how important is to build and protect their corporate reputation through the use of corporate social responsibility policies, leaving behind the idea of the traditional company that focused on financial performance only.

This study was conducted to understand whether companies pursuing policies based on social responsibility outperform those that do not as well as how financial performance of both types of companies was affected by the financial crisis. Companies that have a good relationship with society, as the activities they perform improve the quality of life and the environment, are probably better accepted by the market and therefore are in a better position than the rest of companies.

The results suggest that indeed, on average, companies that pursue policies based on corporate social responsibility have higher values of financial performance compared to companies that do not pursue these policies, both in the short-term (ROE and ROA) and in the long-term (Tobin's Q ). This is in line with the studies by Griffin, Margolis and Walsh, and Orlitzky et al. [4–6].

During the period of crisis, it is possible to conclude that all companies suffered a reduction in financial performance. However, this reduction is less negative in companies that pursue policies based on corporate social responsibility. In fact, this group of companies maintained their performance above the others even during this period of crisis, which meets the findings of Marti et al. [52].

This study contributes to the existing literature on social responsibility and corporate financial performance by providing an overview of the positive aspects of "betting" on social responsibility policies and the resulting benefits. It also contributes to the literatures that study the impact of financial crisis on the relation between corporate social responsibility and finance performance. Thus, it highlights the idea that socially responsible companies benefit from a stronger reputation and image and are therefore better accepted by society, which in turn generates short- and long-term benefits.

The main difficulty found when preparing this study was the lack of information on the variables used, which contributed to reduce the size of the sample. Also, the lack of information made it impossible to use some important variables such as research and development. Therefore, our results should be interpreted with some caution.
