Social capital is a key factor affecting the functioning of financial markets (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales, 2004). However, the estimation of the effect of social capital on credit markets is notoriously difficult. In this paper we exploit the recent Lehman Brothers crisis and a rich dataset to...

The paper reviews the theory of the measurement of poverty. The axiomatic theory is described and the axiomatic properties of poverty indexes are related to assumptions on the functional form of the poverty index function. The notion of poverty ordering is then introduced and followed by a...