A central issue in the debate regarding the relevance of social capital is whether the decline in social embeddedness that has attended modernization over the last 40 years in the United States is as harmful as Putnam, among others, claim it to be. Critics of Putnam's thesis argue that various...

Andreoni (1998) shows that a small amount of seed money from the government can generate substantial additional private donations toward the provision of a public good, when there is a threshold level of provision below which no benefits are achieved. We argue that Andreoni's solution can be...

<link rid="b9">Esteban and Ray (2001)</link> model an increasing marginal cost of effort in providing a public good. If the marginal cost of contribution function has an elasticity greater than 1, then the level of provision is increasing in group size, regardless of the degree of rivalry of the public good. We...

We analyze the effect of group size on public good provision under the <link rid="b8">Morgan (2000)</link> lottery mechanism. For a pure public good, the lottery performs quite well as public good provision is found to increase in group size, even when the lottery prize is held constant. By contrast, for fully rival...