The Impact Of Perceived Income Inequality On Charitable Donation And Its Mechanism

Charitable donations,as a supplement to redistribution,have played a role in regulating income distribution and stabilizing society.People's initial motivation for charitable donations is to make up for less-developed region and disadvantaged groups that are subject to the huge income gap.Therefore,income inequality has become one of the factors that can affect people's donation decisions.However,domestic literature on the relationship between income inequality and charitable donations is scarce.Although foreign scholars have relatively rich theories and research findings,they have failed to reach a unified conclusion.This article believes that the most likely reason is that they use objective income inequality to predict people's donation behavior.In reality,they lack complete information about objective inequality.Especially in China,people's income information is private and scarce,and even the official wealth gap index has been controversial and questioned by the public.Compared with objective inequality,subjective income inequality can affect people's behavioral decisions to a greater extent.Moreover,as the previous research hypothesized,subjective inequality changes with objective inequality,that is,individuals living in an unequal environment also believe that society's resource allocation methods are unfair.Therefore,this article examines the impact of subjective inequality on charitable donations,and conducts heterogeneity analysis and mechanism testing.This article uses the matching data of adult and family economy data of CFPS 2014,2016,2018,and constructs the tobit model to verify the impact of subjective income inequality on charitable donations.By grouping regression and adding interaction items,we examines the heterogeneity of the relationship between subjective income inequality and charitable donation by groups of different income,gender,household registration and family size.We further put forward the idea of cognitive behavioral mechanism.By sorting out the relevant literature research,we investigate the group identification mechanism and social interaction mechanism at the individual level,and the political attitude mechanism and social trust mechanism at the social level,and use the regression coefficient method to test the mediating effect.The results show that subjective income inequality has a positive effect on charitable donation.The results of heterogeneity analysis showed that the level of charitable donation of high income group and low income group increased with the increase of subjective income inequality,but the level of donation of low income group was stronger.The level of charitable donation of male and female increased with the increase of subjective income inequality,but the level of donation of male was more influential.The heterogeneity of urban residents' donation level is higher than that of rural residents,while the donation level of families with larger population is lower.The results of mechanism analysis show that group identity and social interaction are positive mechanisms,that is,subjective income inequality will increase the self-evaluation of human relationship and social networking frequency,and then improve the level of donation;while political attitude and social trust are negative mechanisms,the study found that subjective income inequality will reduce the evaluation of government work and the overall social trust,and then reduce the level of donation.Compared with previous literature,the possible innovations of this article are:(1)This article uses China's micro-survey data to test the impact of subjective income inequality on charitable donations for the first time;(2)Through relevant literature and theoretical summary,this article verifies the positive and the negative mechanism path,which relatively comprehensive analyzed the relationship between income inequality and charitable donations.