Abstract
This study examines the social impact of firms’ Targeted Pairing Assistance (TPA) practices in China, an important yet underexplored aspect of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment based on China’s 2016 disclosure mandate for poverty alleviation engagement, this study finds that TPA increases individual income and reduces poverty rates in paired counties, with results robust to endogeneity concerns. Mechanism tests reveal that TPA alleviates poverty through financial empowerment and industrial development, while heterogeneity analyses show stronger effects in counties with greater economic complexity and formal poverty designation under national policies. Moreover, we document a positive spillover effect of TPA on local entrepreneurship. This study addresses the gap in CSR literature by evaluating whether corporate poverty alleviation programs generate measurable social impacts, providing a more granular perspective on the social dimension of CSR.
Data availability
The publicly available CFPS dataset provides address data only at the provincial level, whereas this study requires finer-grained county-level analysis. To supplement this, we incorporate publicly available county-level statistics where applicable. Due to confidentiality agreements and ethical protections for human-subjects research, the empirical data derived from CFPS are stored securely and cannot be publicly shared. The CFPS project adheres to strict ethical guidelines, including approval by Peking University’s Biomedical Ethics Committee (IRB00001052-14010). Researchers may request access to aggregated datasets, code, and documentation via the official CFPS platform or the Peking University Open Research Data Platform, which supports DOI assignment for shared materials. For details, see: https://www.isss.pku.edu.cn/cfps/en/faq/PublishwithCFPSData/index.htm?CSRFT=2L4S-OLLZ-G2E2-O0CY-HYA8-YBZ9-OZZR-2D0N.
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Acknowledgements
The author appreciates financial support from the MUST Faculty Research Grant (FRG-25-014-MSB). We thank Caining Chen, Jiyi Li, Xin Lyu, Zhibo Qin, Yaohui Ouyang, Wenzhe Zhang for their research assistance in literature sorting.
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Fellow researchers and authors contributed as follows: Zixun Zhou: conceptualization; formal analysis; methodology; writing—original draft, writing—review & editing. Xinyu Zhou: conceptualization; data curation; formal analysis; methodology; writing—original draft, writing—review & editing. Xuezhi Zhang: conceptualization; project administration; supervision, validation, writing—review & editing. Wei Chen: validation; writing—original draft; writing—review & editing. These authors contributed equally to this work and are listed in reverse alphabetical order.
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Zhou, Z., Zhou, X., Zhang, X. et al. Do corporate social responsibility practices alleviate poverty? Evidence from Firms’ targeted pairing assistance with counties. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06659-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06659-5
