We add to the literature by conducting the first empirical assessment of how online networking affects two economically relevant aspects of social capital, i.e. trust and sociability, in a large and representative sample. We address endogeneity in online networking by exploiting technological...

Does Facebook make people lonely and unhappy? Empirical studies have produced conflicting results about the effect of social networking sites (SNS) use on individual welfare. We use a representative sample of the Italian population to investigate how actual and virtual networks of social...

We argue that the use of online networks may threaten subjective well-being in several ways, due to the inherent attributes of Internet-mediated interaction and through its effects on social trust and sociability. We test our hypotheses on a representative sample of the Italian population. We...

Studies in the social capital literature have documented two stylised facts: first, a decline in measures of social participation has occurred in many OECD countries. Second, and more recently, the success of social networking sites (SNSs) has resulted in a steep rise in online social...

This paper examines the poverty and inequality pattern, income and characteristics of households in the Program 135-II communes – the poorest areas in Vietnam. The poverty incidence decreased from 57.5 percent to 49.2 percent during the period 2007-2012. Although the poverty incidence...

This study examines the poverty of the ethnic minorities in the poorest areas in Vietnam. We find that the ethnic minority now constitute more than a half of the poor population, though they account for around 14.5 percent of the population,. The share of the poor ethnic minorities in the total...

This study examines the asset and income pattern of poor ethnic minorities in Northern Mountains of Vietnam using data from a 2010 Northern Mountain Baseline Survey (NMBS) of the Second Northern Mountains Poverty Reduction Project and Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS) 2010. The...