Empirical studies have documented a decline in indicators of social participation in the last decades. The responsibility of social disengagement has been often attributed to pervasive busyness and the rising pressure of time. In this paper we argue that computer-mediated interaction, and...

Which kind of network fosters the diffusion of development-oriented trust? This paper carries out an empirical investigation into the causal relationships connecting four types of social networks (i.e. bonding, bridging, linking, and corporate), and different forms of trust (knowledge-based...

This paper carries out an assessment of the influence that different kinds of social ties exert on labour precariousness, on the state of health of urban environments and on the economic performance in Italy. Overall, the empirical evidence shows that weak ties connecting members of voluntary...

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the causal nexus connecting social capital's diverse aspects to the "quality" of economic development in Italy. The analysis accounts for three main social capital dimensions (i.e. bonding, bridging and linking social capital) and measures them...

The aim of this paper is to trace a map of Italian local social capital endowments. It focuses on the structuraldimension of the concept, as identified with social networks. The analysis is based on a dataset collected by the author including about two hundred indicators of five main social...