The article analyzes the extent of the transmission of social capital from parents to their children. Three measures of social capital are used: social trust, participation in social activities and useful social connections. The data from the longitudinal extension of the PISA collected in the...

Discourse theorists such as Habermas tend to disregard the communicative character and discoursive power of market processes and at the same time overrate the ability of political deliberation to discover and implement social problem solutions. Mainstream economists have little to contribute to...

This paper critically examines the state of the literature in evolutionary biology regarding theories of altruistic behavior. The shared theoretical problems of Kin-selection and Group-selection are examined. Theoretical and severe methodological problems of Reciprocal Altruism theory are also...

The rule of law, constitutional democracy, and market economy are taken as the core institutions of free societies. After arguing that shared values heavily influence institutions, it is asked whether Islamic values are conducive to those institutions. The values are ascertained via the economic...

Constitutional government is an ideal and like all ideals can only be achieved as an approximation. Even those countries that appear to be near the ideal are revealed on examination to be not so near. Constitutional government, to the extent it is achieved reflects a state of affairs. It remains...

We present new evidence on how generalized trust is formed. Unlike previous studies, we look at the explanatory power of economic institutions, we use newer data, we incorporate more countries, and we use instrumental variables to handle the causality problem. A central result is that legal...

During the last 15 years, the social capital literature has grown rapidly. In particular after Robert Putnam’s (1993) study of regional governments in Italy, the interest among economists and politologists exploded as Putnam showed that the concept could be used in quantitative explanations of...

In the main, Hayek favored rules that apply equally to all and located such rules in tradition, beyond conscious construction. This led Hayek to attack Keynes’s immoralism, i.e. the position that one should be free to choose how to lead one’s life irrespective of the informal institutions in...