We analyze individual satisfaction with life as a whole and satisfaction with the personal financial situation for Israeli citizens of Jewish and Arab descent. Our data set is the Israeli Social Survey (2006). We are especially interested in the impact of the religions Judaism, Islam and...

Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One...

The last decade has seen a growing interest among economists on the effect of diversity on the provision of social goods and the stock of social capital. Indeed, in the workplace, cooperation, trust, and other social goods may be important elements of the smooth functioning of an office, but...

This paper investigates how the presence of social capital affects the externality arising from status-seeking preference as a parable for inefficient antagonistic behavior. It is assumed that the stock of social capital is accumulating through joint social interaction between rational...

We examine the effects of differences in social capital on first and second best transfers to families with children, in an asymmetric information context where the number of births, and the future earning capacity of each child that is born, are random variables. The probability that a couple...

Economic growth is propelled in part by the accumulation of different kinds of capital, including social capital in its several guises. This paper considers the interplay between financial crises and various aspects of social capital which, if it is allowed to depreciate, can undermine economic...

This paper reviews economic developments in Iceland following its financial collapse in 2008, focusing on causes and consequences of the crash. The review is presented in the context of the Nordic region, with broad comparisons also with developments elsewhere on the periphery of Europe, in...

In this paper we investigate the long- and short-run relationships between disasters and societal trust. A growing body research suggests that factors such as income inequality, ethnic fractionalization, and religious heritage are important determinants of social capital in general, and trust in...

We claim that a sequential mechanism linking history to development exists: first, history defines the quality of social capital; then, social capital determines the level of corruption; finally, corruption affects economic performance. We test this hypothesis on a dataset of Italian provinces,...

Merchant guilds have been portrayed as “social networks“ that generated beneficial “social capital“ by sustaining shared norms, effectively transmitting information, and successfully undertaking collective action. This social capital, it is claimed, benefited society as a whole by...