Does Social Capital Mitigate Network Access Risk in Private Markets?
研究发现，在金融市场压力时期，位于社区网络紧密、公民参与度高的地区的企业更容易获得融资，而富裕朋友网络则无此效果，表明基于信任和互惠的投资者网络是维持私募融资的韧性机制。
Private markets investors face a largely unrecognized risk: access to financing during periods of market stress may depend not only on fundamentals but on the strength of informal investor networks. This article introduces network access risk as a novel category of private market investment risk. We show that firms located in regions with stronger social capital rooted in tight community networks and civic engagement are more likely to obtain financing during periods of financial market stress, while firms in counties connected through wealthy friend networks do not. This suggests that investor networks built through trust and reciprocity, not wealth, function as a resilience mechanism to sustain private financing when formal capital markets contract. For institutional investors, this implies that geographic and network characteristics represent an underappreciated, measurable, and actionable dimension of private market risk assessment.