The Impact Of Household Financialization On The Perception Of Distributive Fairnes

As one of the hot areas of financial research,household finance focuses on the family’s financial market participation behavior.Relying on modern financial theory,it attempts to solve the "limited participation puzzle" in the financial market,that is,why does the family’s financial behavior deviate from the financial theory.The core idea behind it is still that the institutional environment,behavioral preferences,and personal psychology are the “noise” that influence the financial market to deviate from the efficient market.From the perspective of sociology,Granovetter(1994)has already pointed out that economic action is embedded in social structure and social relations,and factors such as institutional culture and ideology are endogenous variables that affect differences in household financial behavior.Since the advent of various financial instruments,the research on household finance should not only be limited to the behavior differences of households participating in the financial market,but should also focus on a series of impacts of financial phenomena on households.Therefore,this paper starts with the phenomenon of financialization,and examines the consequences and mechanism of the phenomenon of household financialization under this background.The academic discussion on the consequences of economic financialization is relatively consistent,that is,economic financialization deepens social inequality.For objective wealth distribution results,the international community often uses the Gini coefficient to measure,and China’s Gini coefficient has been on the rise since 2015,indicating that the gap between the rich and the poor is constantly widening.However,this paper examines the results of the China Family Panel Studies from 2010 to 2018 on the sense of distributional fairness and finds that although the objective gap between the rich and the poor is gradually deepening,Chinese residents have a positive attitude towards distributional fairness.Therefore,this paper mainly focuses on why Chinese residents’ sense of fairness in income distribution gradually rises under the objective reality of the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor? As finance increasingly affects the daily life of households,has the financialization of households affected residents’ perceptions of distributional fairness in the process?The concept of household financialization derives from the financialization of everyday life and refers to the fact that people are increasingly disciplined by financial logic,learning to think like financial economists and to manage consumption,investment and debt.A series of financial terms such as credit leverage,future cash flow,risk perception,quantitative thinking and other concepts continue to affect the family,changing people’s thoughts and their behavior.The family has changed from a passive financial recipient to active financial participants.Although economic financialization at the macro level and corporate financialization at the meso level objectively exacerbate people’s income inequality,people’s subjective judgments about whether distribution is fair is not only derived from income gaps.The explanation mechanism for the sense of distribution fairness mainly includes: Social structure theory,reference group theory,and cultural value theory.Social structure theory believes that people with higher socioeconomic status recognize the current social distribution status more,and vice versa,they think it is unfair;with reference to group theory,whether distribution is fair or not comes from the interaction with others,if the living conditions of the group are better than their own,It will think that the distribution is unfair,otherwise,it is considered that such distribution is fair;the cultural value theory believes that people’s sense of distribution fairness originates from the local mainstream values,which are internalized in the process of socialization,resulting in distribution.differences in fairness.Therefore,this paper innovatively introduces the variable of household financialization,and combines the above three explanation mechanisms to explore the social consequences of the phenomenon of financialization and how household financialization affects the sense of distributional fairness.In terms of specific research methods,this paper uses the database of CFPS in 2018,and uses the linear hierarchical model and the mediation effect model to analyze the research questions of this paper.The study found that the higher the degree of household financialization,the more negative people felt about social distribution.When testing the three theories of distributive fairness,it is found that if people’s socioeconomic status is higher,their sense of social fairness will be lower;if people’s reference results are better,their distributive fairness will be higher.When analyzing the influencing mechanism of variables,it is found that,first,household financialization will reduce people’s sense of distributional fairness by improving people’s socioeconomic status;secondly,household financialization will reduce people’s distributional fairness by narrowing the results of comparison with people around them.Third,household financialization increases people’s sense of distributive fairness by improving comparisons with past self.