Latent network capital and gender in crowdfunding: Evidence from the Kiva platform

Abstract

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.