公共文化资源普惠化与居民幸福感：基于博物馆发展的证据

Abstract

Despite the widespread policy consensus that universal access to public cultural resources enhances societal welfare, credible causal evidence regarding its influence on residents' subjective well-being remains scarce. This study addresses this gap by integrating prefecture-level museum panel data with the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from 2010 to 2022, framed within the lens of network externalities, to investigate the happiness effects of inclusive museum development on residents. Employing nonparametric visualisation alongside panel threshold regression, this paper identifies a pronounced discontinuous leap in residents' happiness once museum provision in a prefecture-level city reaches approximately 20 institutions - a threshold corresponding to a service radius of roughly 15 kilometres and one-hour travel accessibility. Below this level, museums are spatially fragmented; while they may foster individual cultural engagement, their capacity to generate systemic welfare gains remains contingent upon the formation of a networked infrastructure. Crossing the 20-museum threshold, however, triggers a qualitative transformation: the complementary specialization among heterogeneous museum types, coupled with spatial agglomeration, reconfigures public cultural provision from 'scattered accessibility' to 'networked coverage', and elevates its social function from 'individual cultural experience' to 'collective cultural capital'. This transition, in turn, reinforces residents' cultural participation and strengthens their perceived social belonging. Exploiting the first year in which each city crosses this threshold as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper implements a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) strategy to recover causal effects. The estimates indicate that inclusive museum development raises average happiness by 0.078 points, equivalent to roughly 8% of the dependent variable's standard deviation - a magnitude approximately one-third of the happiness premium associated with moving from low to middle self-rated relative income in the baseline specification. Triangulating evidence from the CFPS, an original nationwide online survey, and textual analysis of visitor reviews from Ctrip, this study identifies three mediating pathways: heightened perceptions of fairness, accumulation of social capital, and improved mental health. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that the effect is more pronounced among males, in cities characterized by greater diversity of museum types, and in economically disadvantaged regions. Notably, the urban-rural gap is statistically negligible, implying that the well-being dividends of inclusive museum development extend beyond metropolitan populations. Collectively, the findings elucidate the nonlinear, threshold-driven nature of public cultural resource allocation, offering actionable empirical foundations for the strategic design of cultural infrastructure and the implementation of scale-conscious cultural policy.