In recent years, corporate social contribution activities have been frequently discussed as duties that must be fulfilled as members of society and as a means of sustainable management, and interest in socially responsible investment funds emphasizing public interest purposes has been growing in capital markets as well. However, research on whether corporate social contribution activities are substantively related to the maximization of firm value remains insufficient. Therefore, this study empirically analyzed the relationship between corporate social contribution activities and firm value. First, this study posited that corporate social contribution activities would have a positive effect on firm value as intangible asset investment for reputation building, while the possibility of overinvestment at management's discretion and the aspect of perquisite consumption for increasing private utility could have a negative effect, and consequently, corporate social contribution activities would have an inverted U-shaped nonlinear relationship with firm value. To test this, pooled OLS, fixed-effects panel analysis, and random-effects panel analysis were conducted on listed non-financial firms from 1999 to 2005. The results confirmed an inverted U-shaped nonlinear relationship between social contribution activities represented by charitable donations and firm value, and in some analyses, a positive linear relationship was also confirmed. These results were consistent in additional analyses using charitable donation expenditure relative to number of employees, the natural logarithm of charitable donation expenditure as the independent variable, or the change in Tobin's Q as the dependent variable, as well as in analyses using sub-samples with extreme values removed. Through 2SLS analysis accounting for endogeneity between variables, it was confirmed that firms with higher charitable donation expenditure had higher firm value. Finally, examining the relationship between charitable donations and firm value according to corporate governance using foreign shareholder ratio as a proxy, an inverted U-shaped relationship was found in firms with high foreign shareholder ratios, while a decrease in firm value was observed in firms with low foreign shareholder ratios. This implies that the absence of monitoring functions over corporate management leads to management's pursuit of private benefits and the consequent decrease in firm value.