The creation and effects of social capital have seldom been a target for systematic analysis in orthodox economics. The purpose of the paper is to argue that in order to include social capital, along with physical and human, into economic analysis, we have to regard human preferences as...

The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters' preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates' policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform...

Besley and Persson (2023) pioneer a political economy model of a green transition with changing preferences. Here we solve for the optimal policy intervention and find that the optimal tax on the polluting good starts high and is subsequently declining, to support the transition in preferences....