In economics, where the long resistance to reflecting on the effects of social interaction on economic behaviour is slowly waning, the concept of social capital may turn out to be a useful analytical tool. However, initial interest in social capital has produced a large variety of definitions,...

Sottolineando l’importanza della struttura sociale e politico- istituzionale dell’economia ai fini della crescita economica, la formulazione di un adeguato modello interpretativo, nello studio dei processi di industrializzazione, richiede di interpretare il rapporto tra economia, società e...

Interest in social capital has grown as it has become apparent that it is an important predictor of collective well-being. Recently, however, attention has shifted to how levels of social capital have changed over time. But focusing on how a society moves from one level of social capital to...

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the relationship between social capital and labour productivity in small and medium enterprises in Italy. By means of structural equations models, the analysis investigates the effect of different aspects of the multifaceted concept of social...

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the relationship between social capital and the quality of economic development in Italy. The analysis draws on a dataset collected by the author including about two hundred variables representing different aspects of economic development and...

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the relationship between social capital and labour productivity in small and medium enterprises in Italy. By means of structural equations models, the analysis investigates the effect of different aspects of the multifaceted concept of social...

The contribution of this paper to the social capital literature is twofold. Drawing on the Italian data, it firstly provides a new framework for measurement, allowing to build indicators for five different components of the multidimensional concept of social capital. Secondly, it provides a...

In this paper we present an economic model contributing to the explanation of religious schism, a topic mostly dealt with in the fields of sociology and psychology so far. The main idea is to see religious groups as networks. These networks may serve as a device for exchanging information about...

This presentation discusses an interpretation and analysis of social capital that is strongly integrated into a framework of social relations. We argue that social capital is organized in four fundamental types of social relations: market, bureaucratic, associative, and communal. Each type of...

Attraverso una rassegna critica della letteratura, questo paper vuole fornire una prima introduzione al concetto di capitale sociale e dare conto del dibattito in corso su questo tema da più di un decennio. Gli studi presi in considerazione sono ripartiti in base al particolare aspetto della...