Does digital financial inclusion alleviate poverty? This study investigates this question by integrating the Digital Financial Inclusion Index of Peking University with microdata from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) to examine how the expansion of digital financial inclusion affects household multidimensional poverty in China. Anchored in Amartya Sen ’ s capability approach and operationalized through the Alkire–Foster (A–F) framework, the study identifies multidimensional poverty across five key dimensions: income, health, education, insurance, and living standards. Probit models are employed to estimate how digital financial inclusion influences both the likelihood and structure of multidimensional poverty, while instrumental variable techniques are used to address potential endogeneity. Beyond the average effects, the study further explores the mechanisms through which digital financial inclusion contributes to poverty alleviation, focusing on three channels—promoting household consumption, increasing financial investment, and enhancing access to credit. The results reveal that digital financial inclusion significantly mitigates multidimensional poverty, particularly by improving income, living standards, and health outcomes, though its effects on education and insurance are limited. These findings underscore the transformative role of digital finance in fostering inclusive growth, suggesting that policies expanding digital financial infrastructure and literacy can amplify its poverty-reducing effects and advance equitable development.

With the elimination of absolute poverty and the improvement of the urbanization rate in China's rural areas, the phenomenon of “urbanization of poverty” has become increasingly prominent. Restricted by the influence of the household registration system, sources of livelihood, social capital, etc., the rural migrants are facing higher social exclusion and a stronger sense of relative deprivation, which makes the rural migrant population become the focus and difficulty of relative poverty governance. Based on the data from the China Migrants Dynamic Survey, this paper discusses the impact of digital financial inclusion on the relative poverty of the rural migrant population. It is found that the development of digital financial inclusion can significantly reduce the incidence of relative poverty among the rural migrant population. Considering different model settings, relative poverty standards, dimensions of digital financial inclusion and the introduction of the number of banks in 1937 as an instrumental variable, the endogeneity test does not change the conclusion of this paper. Further results showed that digital financial inclusion has a greater relative poverty alleviation effect for traditionally disadvantaged groups such as those with low education levels and the older generation, which is in line with the original intention of the development of digital financial inclusion. Therefore, the paper emphasizes that the improvement of the inclusive financial system can restore power and enhance the financial capacity of the rural migrant population, drive the governance of urban relative poverty with the dual wheels of “financial empowerment and ability enhancement”, stimulate the endogenous motivation of common prosperity, and ultimately achieve “people-oriented urbanization” and common prosperity of the people.

We study the potential negative externalities of mandatory environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure. Our analysis exploits a unique regulatory change in China that requires a subset of firms to report their contributions to poverty alleviation—on top of reporting general ESG issues—using a difference-in-differences design. We find that treated firms significantly increase their anti-poverty spending, but also increase their pollution, after the regulatory change came into force. The negative environmental externality is more concentrated in firms that are more financially constrained, as well as firms that are facing fiercer market competition. We further show that this effect is driven by a firm’s incentive to strategically cater to politicians’ agenda in order to obtain preferential treatment. These findings suggest that mandating ESG disclosure in selected areas may induce firms to trade off different ESG goals by prioritizing more conspicuous ESG issues at the cost of trivializing other, longer-term, issues.

Using the Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) disclosure policy in China as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper analyzes the impact of firm TPA disclosure on analyst forecast accuracy using a staggered difference-in-differences model. The results show a significant increase in the accuracy of analysts’ forecasts after firm disclosure of TPA information, and this effect is more pronounced in firms with more greater information asymmetry and firms with less experienced analyst following. Our study provides theoretical and empirical evidence for regulators concerned with information environment of capital market.