Discovering whether social capital endowments in modern societies have been subjected or not to a process of gradual erosion is one of the most debated topics in recent economic literature. This new stream of research has been inaugurated by Putnam's pioneering studies about social capital...

► Present work tests the cross-country comparability of a happiness equation including proxies of social capital and relational goods. ► It focuses on two extremely opposite groups of countries: the richest and the poorest ones. ► The happiness equation is stable in the two groups of...

The contribution of this paper to the social capital literature is threefold. First, we set up a new framework for measurement, allowing us to build indicators for five different dimensions of the concept. Second, we provide a single, synthetic, measure capturing that particular configuration of...

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

Using the initial response data to the 2005 Japan Census, I tried to ascertain the main determinants of the rate of uncollection. The major findings are as follows: (1) The decay of social capital lowers the response rate. (2) Inequality is associated with a low response rate, while generational...

This paper explores, using panel data of traffic accidents in Japan, how formal and informal deterrence affect driving manners. I found through fixed effects and fixed effects 2SLS estimations that formal deterrents, such as police, cause drivers to drive attentively but that this effect is not...

Recently the Japanese film industry revived after a long period of decline. This has been accompanied by structural changes characterized by the present growth of multiplexes and consumer demand. This paper attempts to explore the recent revival process of the film industry in Japan using panel...

Using Japanese prefecture-level panel data, this paper examines how the crime rate is affected by formal and informal deterrents as reflected by police and social capital, respectively. Both, however, suffer from the endogeneity problem and therefore the estimation results are biased when...

This paper explores how an early leader's choices influence later followers' choices via social interaction, and to what extent this sequential behavior enhances industrial development by using the long-term data of Japanese professional baseball. Major findings make it evident that the "Leader"...

This paper uses cross-country data compiled immediately after the Fukushima nuclear accident to investigate how the experience of such disasters affects the perception of the risk of nuclear accidents. Estimation results show that the perceived risk of a nuclear accident is positively associated...