This paper offers an overview of the main literature on social capital in the light of Paldam’s (2000) “social capital dream”. Its main contributions can be summed as follows. Firstly, It develops an encompassing definition of social capital built on social interactions, social norms and...

In this paper, we consider a simple model that integrates the component of the social network as a research method of workers as well as a method of recruitment policy by firms. Indeed, taking into account the social sphere is fundamental to understand the labor market dynamic in developing...

This paper presents the first empirical assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and health in Italy. The analysis draws on the 2000 wave of the Multipurpose Survey on Household conducted by the Italian Institute of Statistics on a representative sample of the population (n =...

This paper presents the first empirical assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and health in Italy. The analysis draws on the 2000 wave of the Multipurpose Survey on Household conducted by the Italian Institute of Statistics on a representative sample of the population (n =...

This paper carries out a preliminary and exploratory investigation into the effect of various types of social interaction on health in Italy. After controlling for household income, education, work status and a number of socio-demographic variables, we find that the frequency of meetings with...

We set up a theoretical framework to analyze the possible role of economic growth and technical progress in the erosion of social capital. Under certain parameters, the relationship between technical progress and social capital can take the shape of an inverted U curve. We show the circumstances...

The public health literature focusing on the detrimental effects of social isolation has shown that the quantity of social connections is positively correlated with individual health. Drawing on pooled cross-sectional data, we test this hypothesis on a representative sample of the Italian...

Recent economic research has focused on the economic effects of the social environment. In the economic literature, important phenomena are considered, at least in part, as results of the individual's social environment. There is a similar revival of interest among economists who analyse the...

Accounting for within-country spatial differences is a much neglected issue in many cross-country comparisons. This paper highlights this importance in this empirical analysis of the impact of a country’s degree of social and economic globalization on female employment in 33 OECD countries,...

Ken Arrow (1998) asks, “What has economics to say about racial discrimination?” He replies – entirely correctly – that racial “segregation within an industry – that is, firms with either all black or all white labor forces” – may be explained by economic theory, but “the...