A vast literature has investigated the relationship between trust and aggregate economic performance. We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We .nd that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs available in...

To explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical experiences of cooperation (Putnam, 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others. We show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively...