This paper studies the global variation in economic preferences. For this purpose, we present the Global Preference Survey (GPS), an experimentally validated survey dataset of time preference, risk preference, positive and negative reciprocity, altruism, and trust from 80,000 individuals in 76...

Theorists and policy analysts have convincingly argued that greater trust makes a more efficient society by eliminating costly contracts or expensive reputations. Concurrently, experiments suggest that reciprocity is a potent substitute for law when compliance with contracts is imperfectly...

Using a sample of Harvard undergraduates, we analyze trust and social capital in two experiments. Trusting behavior and trustworthiness rise with social connection; differences in race and nationality reduce the level of trustworthiness. Certain individuals appear to be persistently more...

This paper uses data from global and Canadian surveys data to estimate the powerful linkages between social connections, their related social identities, and subjective well-being. Our explanatory variables include several measures of the extent and frequency of use of social networks, combined...

We establish an inverse relationship between family ties and political participation, such that the more individuals rely on the family as a provider of services, insurance, transfer of resources, the lower is one's civic engagment and political participation. We also show that strong family...

In a cross-section of countries, government regulation is strongly negatively correlated with social capital. We document this correlation, and present a model explaining it. In the model, distrust creates public demand for regulation, while regulation in turn discourages social capital...

To explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical experiences of cooperation (Putnam 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others. We show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively...

We combine theory with data from different domains to provide an empirical analysis of the scale and variability of social capital as wealth. This is used to argue, given what we have learned in the literature on social capital, that the welfare returns to investing in trust could be...

Business environments dominated by information flows and autonomous tasks, typical of knowledge-intensive industries, are likely to require enough social capital to be viable and productive. In this paper, we use new EUKLEMS-INTANProd industry-level data (Bontadini et al., 2023a) covering a...