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 Kiva, platform reaching 3.7 million borrowers, 81 % of them women, assessing how interplay between capital and project proposer affects amount funds raised. To this aim, we develop notion whereby two are linked if they share funder, as both benefit from visibility signalling confidence them. capture project's centrality within network, finding that elasticity raised, while remaining positive, is lower women-led than male-led ones extending any pre-existing projects' gap.