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Social Capital and Collusion: The Case of Merchant Guilds

Dessí, Roberta; Olgivie, Sheilagh - CESifo - 2003

Merchant guilds have been portrayed as “social networks“ that generated beneficial “social capital“ by sustaining shared norms, effectively transmitting information, and successfully undertaking collective action. This social capital, it is claimed, benefited society as a whole by...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005765797

Guilds, Efficiency, and Social Capital: Evidence from German Proto-Industry

Ogilvie, Sheilagh - CESifo - 2002

This paper analyzes an early modern German economy to test alternative theories about guilds. It finds little evidence to support recent hypotheses arguing that guilds corrected market failures relating to product quality, training, and innovation. But it finds that guilds were social networks...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005405799

Do Natural Disasters Enhance Societal Trust?

Toya, Hideki; Skidmore, Mark - CESifo - 2012

In this paper we investigate the long- and short-run relationships between disasters and societal trust. A growing body … determinants of social capital in general, and trust in particular. We present new cross-country and panel data evidence of another … important determinant of trust—the frequency of natural disasters. Frequent naturally occurring events such as storms require …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010877834

Can Integrity Replace Institutions? Theory and Evidence

Aharonovitz, Gilad D.; Skuza, Nathan; Fahs, Faysal - CESifo - 2009

Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but are replaceable by trust or other social norms. We show … that when proper institutions and trust are missing, integrity of the individuals can replace them. We construct a model of …) trust, or (3) integrity, foster economic growth. We construct data of economic performance of social groups in Lebanon …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005013043

Iceland: How Could This Happen?

Gylfason, Thorvaldur - CESifo - 2014

This paper reviews economic developments in Iceland following its financial collapse in 2008, focusing on causes and consequences of the crash. The review is presented in the context of the Nordic region, with broad comparisons also with developments elsewhere on the periphery of Europe, in...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010877635

The Historical Roots of Corruption and Economic Development in Italy

Petrarca, Ilaria; Ricciuti, Roberto - CESifo - 2013

We claim that a sequential mechanism linking history to development exists: first, history defines the quality of social capital; then, social capital determines the level of corruption; finally, corruption affects economic performance. We test this hypothesis on a dataset of Italian provinces,...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010641421

The Compensating Income Variation of Social Capital

Groot, Wim; Brink, Henriette Maassen van den; Praag, … - CESifo - 2007

trust to define social capital empirically. In this paper we use three different measures of social capital: the size of the …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005094211

Optimal Policy Towards Families with Different Amounts of Social Capital, in the Presence of Asymmetric Information and Stochastic Fertility

Cigno, Alessandro; Luporini, Annalisa - CESifo - 2006

We examine the effects of differences in social capital on first and second best transfers to families with children, in an asymmetric information context where the number of births, and the future earning capacity of each child that is born, are random variables. The probability that a couple...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005181449

Surfing Alone? The Internet and Social Capital: Evidence from an Unforeseeable Technological Mistake

Bauernschuster, Stefan; Falck, Oliver; Woessmann, Ludger - CESifo - 2011

Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009024847

Political Socialization in Flux? Linking Family Non-Intactness during Childhood to Adult Civic Engagement

Hener, Timo; Rainer, Helmut; Siedler, Thomas - CESifo - 2012

Over the last several decades, there has been a widespread decrease in civic engagement coinciding with a breakdown in traditional family structures in many countries throughout the developed world. According to Putnam in Bowling alone (2000), however, none of the major declines in civic...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010570049