Dangers of a Double-Bottom Line: A Poverty Targeting Experiment Misses Both Targets

Dean Karlan, Adam Osman and Jonathan Zinman

No 12838, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Two for-profit Philippine social enterprises, aiming to demonstrate corporate social responsibility by increasing microlending to the poor, incorporated a widely-used poverty measurement tool into their loan applications and tested the tool using randomized training content. Treated loan officers were instructed why and how to use the tool for targeting; control group training merely labelled the tool “additional household information†. The targeting training backfired, leading to no additional poor applicants and lower-performing loans. Descriptive evidence suggests the targeting training exacerbated loan officer misperceptions and multitasking problems. Our results help explain why corporate social responsibility efforts are often siloed from core operations.

Keywords: Corporate social responsibility; Double-bottom line; Multi-tasking; Social business; Poverty targeting; Discrimination; Microfinance; Microcredit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D22 D92 G21 O12 O16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mfd and nep-sea
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Working Paper: Dangers of a Double-Bottom Line: A Poverty Targeting Experiment Misses Both Targets (2018)
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