Mancur Olson and Robert Putnam provide two conflicting views on the effect of involvement with voluntary associations on their members. Putnam argues that associations instill in their members habits of cooperation, solidarity and public spiritedness. Olson emphasizes the tendency of groups to...

Trust in strangers is key for economic development. Social capital theory posits that participation in associations is essential to propagate trust in society, because membership instils trust both towards other members and generalised others. We provide an experimental test for this thesis. We...

Experimental evidence shows that people tend to be more cooperative with persons belonging to their own group than with others. Strangely enough, this literature largely fails to consider a type of group pervasive in modern societies: colleagues belonging to the same productive organization....

Creditworthiness and trustworthiness are almost synonyms since the act of conferring a loan has the indirect effect of signaling the trustworthiness of the borrower. We test the creditworthiness-trustworthiness nexus in an investment game experiment on a sample of participants/non participants...

Many scholars have stressed the importance of membership in associations as one of the main determinants of inter-personal trust (e.g. Zucker, 1986; Coleman, 1990; Lahno, 1995). In particular, Olson (1982) and Putnam et al. (1993) provided two different accounts of the role of private voluntary...