Recent work on Cohn et al. (2019) shows that civic honesty captured in a wallet-return experiment varies considerably across the world. This paper uses the new experiment to validate the alternative way of measuring trust and honesty from questionnaires. Comparisons of wallet return rates and...

Consequences of social trust are comparatively well studied, while its societal determinants are often subject to debate. This paper studies both in the context of Catalan attempts to secede from Spain: First, we test if Catalonia enjoys higher levels of social capital that it is prevented from...

Social trust has been identified as a catalyst for reforms. We take the literature further in two ways. First, we make a fine-grained analysis of mechanisms through which social trust enables liberalizing reforms - by strengthening the ability to overcome obstacles in the political process...

While previous research documents a negative relationship between government size and economic growth, suggesting an economic cost of big government, a given government size generally affects growth differently in different countries. As a possible explanation of this differential effect, we...

High levels of social trust has been linked to both public sector size and long term economic growth, thereby helping to explain how some countries are able to combine high taxes and relatively high levels of economic growth. This paper examines if social trust as a background factor also...