We look at the effect of religiosity on social trust, defined as the share of a population that thinks that people in general can be trusted. This is important since social trust is related to many desired outcomes, such as growth, education, democratic stability and subjective well-being. The...

We investigate to what extent tolerance, as measured by attitudes toward different types of neighbors, affects economic growth. Data from the World Values Survey enable us to investigate tolerance–growth relationships for 54 countries. We provide estimates based on cross-sectional as well as...

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...

This paper reviews the methodology and evidence of recent regression literature attributing the African growth shortfall to lack of social capital. It finds that the literature is not able to account for the actual economic growth experience, only in a significantly reformulated and misleading...

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...

We conduct an extensive robustness analysis of the relationship between trust and growth for a later time period (the 1990s) and with a bigger sample (63 countries) than previous studies. In addition to robustness tests that focus on model uncertainty, we use Least Trimmed Squares, a robust...

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...

We present new evidence on the influence of income inequality on generalized trust. Using individual panel data from Swedish counties together with an instrumental variable strategy, we find that differences in disposable income, and especially differences among people in the bottom half of the...

The paper presents an experimental study of truth telling and trust in communication under asymmetric information. In a two-player Communication Game (cf., Gneezy, 2005), an informed “advisor” sends a message to an uninformed “decision maker”, who then has to decide whether to follow the...

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...