Latent network capital and gender in crowdfunding: Evidence from the Kiva platform

This paper studies the gender gap in accessing financial resources through crowdfunding by developing a novel construct for social capital, latent network capital. We provide original empirical evidence based on 985 projects hosted on Kiva, a platform reaching 3.7 million borrowers, 81 % of them women, assessing how the interplay between latent network capital and the gender of a project proposer affects the amount of funds raised. To this aim, we develop the notion of a latent network whereby two projects are linked if they share a funder, as they both benefit from the visibility of the funder, signalling confidence in them. We capture a project's latent network capital through the project's centrality within this latent network, finding that the latent network capital elas-ticity of the amount of funds raised, while remaining positive, is lower for women-led projects than for male-led ones extending any pre-existing projects' gender gap.