“排斥”还是“包容”:传统宗族文化与现代银行发展

Resistance or Compatibility:Traditional Clan Culture and Modern Banking Development

已有研究指出,广义信任的缺乏会降低企业和居民的金融需求,从而阻碍金融发展,而中国传统宗族文化通行的是有限信任而非广义信任。同时,也有观点认为宗族依赖内部金融市场的社会规范会导致对外部金融的替代。这是否意味着宗族文化排斥金融发展?本文以银行发展为研究对象,基于家谱数据构建城市层面宗族文化指标,结合银行业分支机构的开设情况,对二者之间的关系和作用机制进行实证分析。基准模型和工具变量回归结果显示,宗族文化显著促进了银行发展。然后,本文借助2009年监管部门放松中小银行分支机构开设的供给端政策,证实宗族文化对银行发展的包容源于需求端。进一步区分企业和居民需求的结果支持后者。前述发现与信任和社会规范的逻辑相悖。影响机制检验表明,宗族文化越浓厚,居民受教育程度、金融知识水平越高,进而对银行服务(存款、银行卡)的需求也越多。本文拓展了文化与金融方面的文献,对于理解区域金融发展差异,洞悉传统文化永不褪色的价值有一定的启示意义。

What accounts for significant cross-national differences in terms of financial development?Law and finance literature has found that the origin of national legal system has strong explanatory power.Common-law systems that provide greater security of property rights enjoy a higher level of financial development than civil-law countries that respect the authority of courts(La Porta et al.,1998;Beck et al.,2003).Even in a single country featuring an integrated financial market and the same legal system,differences of financial development still exist at the local level(Guiso et al.,2004 a).Recent years have witnessed a fast-growing literature on finance that takes a cultural perspective(Zingales,2015).Some studies show that cultural inheritance has shaped differences in local financial development(Grosjean,2011;Pascali,2016;D’Acunto et al.,2019).Chinese traditional society has adopted a clan-based organizational system and regulated the behavior of its members by ethics and credit regime,while its European counterparts have taken a distinct trajectory of societal organization culminating in the formation of corporation ensured by contracts(Greif&Tabellini,2010,2017).The trust radius of clan culture is shorter,and more trust is given to clan members relative to outsiders.The corporation culture has a more generalized range of trust extending between communities,but the trust level is weaker(Greif&Tabellini,2010,2017).It should be noted that the lack of generalized trust will hinder the banking development(D’Acunto et al.,2019).In addition,the internal financial markets within the clan dramatically reduced the demand for external finance(Wong&Rosenthal,2019).Accordingly,Chen et al.(2020)found that clan culture had a repelling effect on the banking development in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China.Whether the influence of clan culture on the banking industry continues to the present day still needs to be tested empirically.This paper aims to investigate the relationship between clan culture and banking development in China by constructing a city-level clan cultural indicator based on genealogical data and exploring geographical distributions of bank branches.The results of the benchmark model and instrumental variable regression show that the clan culture has a significant positive impact on the number of bank branches,namely clan culture can significantly promote the banking development.In 2009,the regulatory authorities issued policies to deregulate small and medium-sized banks by relaxing constraints on branches supply.The results suggest that the aforementioned conclusions are still valid for the treated bank-city groups,indicating that the stronger clan culture boosts higher demand for banks.If the needs of enterprises and residents are differentiated,the same tendency is more pronounced in the latter.The above findings are contrary to the theories of trust and social norm.Further study of underlying mechanisms indicates that the stronger the clan culture is,the better educated and more financially informed the residents will become,and the greater demand for banking services(such as bank deposits and cards)they will have.This paper has three main contributions as follows.First,it expands the literature in the field of culture and finance.Existing articles mainly focus on topics such as immigration employment,corporate financing,corporate governance,and private sector development,but rarely involve financial development.Besides,the literature on financial development is usually concerned with its impact on macro-economies and micro-enterprises,as well as the underlying explanatory factors of variations in financial development.This paper has enriched the existing research with the cultural perspective.Second,previous studies have mostly discussed the trust and social norm mechanism of clan culture(Greif&Tabellini,2017;Chen et al.,2020).This article finds that clan culture affects financial development through education and financial literacy,which verifies the knowledge dissemination mechanism of clan culture(de la Croix et al.,2018)and enriches the research on financial literacy(van Rooij et al.,2011).Third,this paper provides a new insight with regard to the relationship between traditional clan culture and modern banking development,and finds that clan culture’s compatibility to the modern banking development outplays its resistance.It adds up to a deeper understanding of underlying reasons behind discrepancies in local financial development and the ever-lasting impact of traditional culture,and helps to build confidence in Chinese traditional culture.