Social impact and capital structure: an exploratory study of the Italian B-Corps

The study aims to contribute to the debate on the role of capital structure choices in seeking positive social impact, by focusing on B-Corps. B-Corps are businesses that attained a certification by having demonstrated to meet high standard of social and environmental performance. B-Corps provide a singular cross-industry context for research focused on sustainable and social ventures. By using data of 155 Italian B-Corps via analysis of their Benefit Impact Assessment (BIA), the research employed a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (FsQCA) in order to understand the possible combinations of contingency factors able to influence the social impact performance of the Italian B-Corps. BIA is the outcome of the analysis, while the selected conditions refer to the B-Corps dimension, their economic performance in terms of sustainability of financial charges and their capital structure choices. This study reveals first that different combinations of factors might contribute to gain results in terms of BIA, thus confirming that B-Corps with different features might support the creation of social impact. Moreover, the analysis has showed how the configurations for gaining higher and lower BIA levels are different, thus highlighting that the factors influencing a good result in terms of social impact are not simply the opposite of the factors that can lead to a lower result. Finally, the capital structure choices seem to emerge as a condition able to produce an effect on the BIA index. Having a stronger capital structure might influence the pursuing of social impact performance. To the extent of our knowledge, the possible connection between social impact creation and capital structure choices has not been sufficiently analyzed till now. This is among the first studies aimed at investigating the contribution of capital structure choices to positive impact on society.