Social Networks, Informal Finance and Residents’ Happiness: An Empirical Analysis Based on Data of CFPS in 2016

Lu Juan; Li Bin

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.jsufe.2018.04.004

Summary

With the improvement of people’s material living standards, residents’ happiness has gradually become an important indicator of social progress. In the study of the influence of residents’ happiness, the social network relationship in the spiritual aspect and the informal finance in the material aspect cannot be ignored. This paper brings the three variables of social networks, informal finance and residents’ happiness into the same research framework. What is the impact of heterogeneous social networks and informal finance on residents’ happiness by refining the characteristics of social networks and informal finance? Combining with the data from the 2016 China Family Panel Studies, empirical results are obtained: （1） The relation among relatives, neighbors and workmates all have positive effects on happiness, and the influence of workmates is greater than that of relatives and neighbors. The influence of personal social status on happiness is greater than that of families and communities, while the relation between families and governments is not obvious. （2） The results of informal finance show that low income families prefer private lending to smooth consumptions and increase happiness. Middle income families resort to private lending to start a business so as to improve income and happiness. （3） From the perspective of horizontal social networks, relatives and friends can facilitate mutual private lending, and working relationship can improve residents’ happiness by promoting investment lending; from the perspective of vertical social networks, the promotion of personal social status and the close ties between families and communities are conducive to the ease of private lending, thus improve residents’ happiness. （4） The article further adopts the classification regression, and the results show that in the urban and rural sample comparison, the favorable relationship among workmates is more beneficial to the improvement of residents’ happiness, and the higher the personal social status of residents in rural areas is, the higher the influence of residents’ happiness is. In the regression results of different age groups, the individual well-being of young families is the most dependent on kinship, and the influence of personal social status on the well-being of elderly families is particularly prominent. The enlightenment of this article is to tell us that the social network relation is very important to residents’ happiness, and the horizontal social network and the vertical social network have different effects on the improvement of residents’ happiness through the day-to-day informal lending act.