The Empirical Study Of Social Capital And Personal Income

In recent years, the growth rate of China’s economy is gradually slowing down. Under the background of increasing difficulty in exports and shrink in foreign demand,it is urgent to accelerate economic transformation in order to maintain sustainable and healthy development of economy,which means it needs to increase the income of urban residents.From the micro perspective, the major factors that affect the income level are human capital and political capital. As an important and invisible capital,does social capital also have the role to increase income?And what is the extent of it?These questions deserve to be studied and discussed.China is a relationship-based country,and almost all the people live depend on relationships.Everyone has relationships with others in daily life,thus that forms a criss-cross network of relationships.China’s social life is conducted in such a network of relationships.Therefore,the relationship network is an important part of social life.In modern society,the presence or absence of social relations and the width of relationship network cause a huge difference on individual achievement.As the academic community generally agrees that social network is the core content of social capital, and the width of relationship network has an important role in personal achievementThis paper is based on the theory of social network relationship, and empirically analyzes the impact on personal income from the perspective of social network size. According to Bian’s theory,the social network size in this paper is defined as the total number of people that visit during the Spring Festival.This paper’s empirical part is expanded Mincer model.Using the data of China General Social Survey2006,it examines the impact of social network size on the personal income of urban residents with the methods of ordinary least squares regression and quantile regression.The results of basic least squares regression show that in the case of the control of gender,ethnicity, party membership and other variables, the size of social network has a significant positive effect on personal income.After adding the interaction terms of social network size with party membership,region,education and technical title in the model,the results show as the followings.First,the income effect of social network size has no difference between party and non-party members.Second,the income effect of social network size in central region is higher than that in western region.Third, the higher the education level is, the lower the social network size yields.Fourth, there are significant differences in the income effect of social network size between low technical titles and medium technical as well as between non-technical titles and medium technical titles.After adding market indicators, the regression results show that the income effect of social network size declines with the boosting trend of marketization.With the method of quantile regression,the results show that the inncome effect of social network size is significantly positive on each quantile,and the coefficient shows an upward trend after the fall with the increase in income.So the expansion of social network size helps to narrow the income gap between the lowest income class and the middle income class,and even the higher income class.