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Impacts of Urbanisation on Trust: Evidence from a Lab in the Field on a Natural Experiment

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  • Elvis Cheng Xu

Abstract

We conduct a field trust game under a natural experiment context to test the impacts of urbanisation on trust. We conjecture that urbanisation, defined in this context as the process of state-led rural-urban migration, contributes to a transformation of trust levels among co-villagers and towards outsiders. We test this conjecture in an experimental approach and more generally, examine whether the urbanisation will produce significant impacts on in-group trust and out-group trust. The research finds that urbanisation does not decrease significantly the trust towards co-villagers, meaning the in-group trust did not change statistically significantly. However, the trust towards outsiders does increase as a result of the state-led urbanisation. We also run a regression on the trust exhibited towards participants in the experiment and found the partial effect of whether they are co-villagers or outsiders weakens as a result of the urbanisation, and therefore conclude urbanisation decreases out-group discrimination in trust.

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  • Elvis Cheng Xu, 2019. "Impacts of Urbanisation on Trust: Evidence from a Lab in the Field on a Natural Experiment," Artefactual Field Experiments 00676, The Field Experiments Website.
    • Handle: RePEc:feb:artefa:00676
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