| Aging population is a crucial challenge for China in the future years.According to the National Bureau of Statistics,the number of people aged 60 and above in China hit 253 million in 2019,accounting for 18.1% of the total population,and the number of people aged 65 or above reached 176 million,accounting for 12.6% of total population.Over the past 30 years since the reform and opening up,mare and more young rural labors working in the city due to the widening economic development gap between urban and rural areas,the rural elderly who cannot move into city because old age,disease and other factors constitute the majority of the current rural population in China.The traditional family endowment and rearing children for old age are gradually wakened,and the rural social endowment insurance is in urgent need of stat up.On September 1st,2009,the State Council issued the guidance on carrying out the pilot project of a new type of rural social endowment insurance,gradually establish a new type of rural social endowment insurance system,and basically achieved the national coverage in 2012.The emergence of new rural social endowment insurance system,effectively alleviate the poverty of rural elderly,improve the rural elderly consumption,significantly reduce their work time,improve the level of welfare.New rural social endowment insurance system has been embodied effect in rural areas.But,new rural social endowment insurance system,based on payment has implemented for more than a decade,has never been getting rid of symbolic payment dilemma.A huge part of people chooses the low grade,and thus vastly restrict the development of system.Compared with urban society,the features of traditional rural society,such as “guanxi”and “acquaintance”,are still existed.Considering most people who participated system are still living in rural areas,this network plays a curial role among them.In such a society,people know each other well,communicate with each other more frequently,and often exchange information,help each other,and jointly maintain such a relationship.Above all,this paper starts from the features of traditional rural society,and on the basis of clarifying the concept of peer effect,first uses the common knowledge model formalized by economist Robert J.Aumann in 1976 to theoretically prove the existence of peer effect in the contribution of new rural social endowment insurance system.Then,using China Healthy and Retirement Longitudinal Study(CHARLS)in the year of 2015,this study empirically verified the impact of peer effect on payment grades of new rural endowment insurance.The regression results show that there is indeed an existence of peer effect on payment grades of new rural endowment insurance.In order to ensure the robustness of the baseline regression,we use the instrumental variable method to check the results.Considering the heterogeneity of people,this paper analyzes the heterogeneity from two aspects: the time when people living in the rural areas and the interact frequency among people.The results show that the longer the time of living in the same village and the lower interact frequency of people,the greater the influence of the peer effect.The channel test shows that the peer effect has role effect on payment grades of new rural endowment insurance.In the rural context,the behaviors of older persons will affect younger persons,and the behaviors of higher-educated persons will affect lower-educated persons.Furthermore,considering that some phenomena existing in the real society may affect the robustness of the results,this paper discusses from two aspects of deleting the same amount of payment under the villages and the peer effect on own respectively,so as to exclude the influence of some regions’ paying the same payment and the agent payment between relatives and friends.In addition,we use simulation test method,linear mean model and Altonji method to check robustness.According to above results,this paper puts two policy suggestions: firstly,the channel test shows that the peer effect on payment grades of new rural endowment insurance has role effect.Hence,the government can guide these roles to increase the payment,and then drive others to pay high payment of the new rural endowment insurance.Then,the heterogeneity test shows that information collection is valuable to person.Therefore,only by strengthening policy publicity and letting people know more about the policy can they make their own optimal decisions. |
