Financial Inclusion: Does Cultural Heterogeneity Matter?
研究文化内部异质性（个人主义价值观的分布差异）如何降低金融包容性，发现异质性通过增加非正式网络和减少对银行机构的信任来起作用，且其影响在个人主义国家超过文化均值。
ABSTRACT Culture plays an important role in determining the financial inclusion of individuals. However, most studies consider culture as a homogeneous element. In this study, we lift the assumption of cultural homogeneity and look at how intra‐cultural variation, i.e., the population distribution of a characteristic within a culture, affects financial inclusion. We use the World Bank's Global Findex database and show that intra‐cultural variation in individualism values reduces financial inclusion. This reduction can be explained by the fact that a high degree of heterogeneity in the individualism cultural dimension leads to an increase in the informal network within a country and a decrease in trust in banking institutions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that in individualistic countries, the effect of intra‐cultural variation outweighs that of the cultural means. This effect highlights the significance of considering cultural diversity in understanding financial inclusion. Our results are robust to several alternative specifications.