This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs...

We use a repeated survey of a large sample of clients of an Italian bank to measure possible changes in investors’ risk aversion following the 2008 financial crisis. We find that both a qualitative and a quantitative measure of risk aversion increase substantially after the crisis. These...

While both cultural and legal norms (institutions) help foster cooperation, culture is the more primitive of the two and itself sustains formal institutions. Cultural changes are rarer and slower than changes in legal institutions, which makes it difficult to identify the role played by culture....

Is social capital long lasting? Does it affect long term economic performance? To answer these questions we test Putnam’s conjecture that today marked differences in social capital between the North and South of Italy are due to the culture of independence fostered by the free city states...

We study whether culture has an independent role in creating persistence of institutional shocks by testing whether today’s notable differences in civic capital between the North and the South of Italy are the legacy of the medieval free city-state experience of the Middle Ages. We show that...

We study which dimensions of corporate culture are related to a firm’s performance and why. We find that proclaimed values appear irrelevant. Yet, when employees perceive top managers as trustworthy and ethical, firm’s performance is stronger. We then study how different governance...

We use survey data to study American households‘ propensity to default when the value of their mortgage exceeds the value of their house even if they can afford to pay their mortgage (strategic default). We find that 26% of the existing defaults are strategic. We also find that no household...

Entering a currency union without any political union European countries have taken a gamble: will the needs of the currency union force a political integration (as anticipated by Monnet) or will the tensions create a backlash, as suggested by Kaldor, Friedman and many others? We try to answer...