Latent network capital and gender in crowdfunding: Evidence from the Kiva platform
本文提出“潜在网络资本”这一新概念，基于Kiva平台985个项目的数据，发现女性主导项目从潜在网络资本中获得的资金提升幅度低于男性，从而加剧了性别融资差距。
This paper studies the gender gap in accessing financial resources through crowdfunding by developing a novel construct for social capital, latent network capital. We provide original empirical evidence based on 985 projects hosted on Kiva, a platform reaching 3.7 million borrowers, 81 % of them women, assessing how the interplay between latent network capital and the gender of a project proposer affects the amount of funds raised. To this aim, we develop the notion of a latent network whereby two projects are linked if they share a funder, as they both benefit from the visibility of the funder, signalling confidence in them. We capture a project's latent network capital through the project's centrality within this latent network, finding that the latent network capital elasticity of the amount of funds raised, while remaining positive, is lower for women-led projects than for male-led ones extending any pre-existing projects' gender gap.