Prof. Liu Chengfang's team published an article in China Economic Review

Release date：2023/08/14　　Source： CCAP

On August 12, 2023, the international academic journal China Economic Review published online the research paper "Can social capital facilitate households' donations in rural China?" by Prof. Liu Chengfang's team and co-workers, who are vice dean of the School of Advanced Agriculture at Peking University and deputy director of CCAP. Can social capital facilitate households' donations in rural China?

Charitable donations are an important component of the third income distribution. The authors' team explored the impact of social capital on the donation behavior of rural households based on primary survey data of nearly 3,300 households in eight Chinese provinces collected in 2018 and 2022. The survey data show that about 24% of the farm households have made donations during 2019-2021, and the main purpose of the donations is to contribute to the poor and sick individuals. In order to address the endogeneity of social networks, the authors used lagged explanatory variables and instrumental variables methods.2 The regression results of the SLS show that farmers with stronger social capital (stronger social networks and having family members who are party members) are not only more likely to donate, but also donate more often and donate a larger amount of money. The results of the mechanism analysis suggest that social capital may promote farmers' donations through information effect, responsibility effect and reputation effect. The article verifies the robustness of the above results by using different models, resetting the weights, and controlling for more omitted variables.

Chen Siwei, a PhD student at the School of Advanced Agriculture, Peking University, class of 2022, is the first author of this result, and his supervisor, Prof. Liu Chengfang, is the corresponding author of this article. Prof. Ji-Kun Huang and Huayong Zhi from the School of Advanced  Agriculture, Peking University are the co-authors of this paper. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under the Distinguished Youth Fund Program and other grants.

Cite source: Chen, Siwei, Chengfang Liu*, Jikun Huang, Huayong Zhi. 2023. Can social capital facilitate households’ donations in rural China? China Economic Review (2023), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chieco.2023.102034.

Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X23001190