Volunteering is a dominant social force that signals a healthy state. However, although the literature on volunteering is extensive, knowledge on how life’s discontinuities (life event shocks) affect volunteering is limited because most studies work with static (cross-sectional) data. To...

We develop a dynamic model to analyze the sources and the evolution of social participation and social capital in a growing economy characterized by exogenous technical progress. Starting from the assumption that the well-being of agents basically depends on material and relational goods, we...

Why do parties offer environmental policies in their political programs? While a number of papers examine the determinants of citizens’ pro-environmental behaviour, we know little about the extent to which political parties adjust their platform towards environmentalism. We investigate this...

The Community Inclusion model described in this paper characterizes the stages through which a diverse group of people living within the same community develops into an inclusive community. The model is described in terms of its usefulness in the assessment of a community’s current stage of...

This article aims to investigate some aspects of the social process related to water resources management and gender relations. Given that gender and water management are interrelated issues exposed to a growing attention at the international level, it is therefore necessary to identify...

This paper analyses the contribution to the creation of a culturally diverse Sydney landscape by ethnic communities following the arrival of over a million and half non-English speaking settlers since 1948. Through fragmented collective actions, around 450 communal places were established to...

We analyze delinquent networks of adolescents in the United States. We develop a dynamic network formation model showing who the key player is, i.e. the criminal who once removed generates the highest possible reduction in aggregate crime level. We then structurally estimate our model using data...

This paper studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex-ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and deterrence affect criminal activities. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed...

Why has the expansion of women’s economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and...

This paper investigates empirically the determinants of individuals’ attitudes towards preventing environmental damage in Spain using data from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey for the periods 1990, 1995 and 1999/2000. Compared to many previous studies, we present a richer...