This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs...

We use survey data to study American households' propensity to default when the value of their mortgage exceeds the value of their house even if they can afford to pay their mortgage (strategic default). The cost of defaulting strategically increases in wealth, but at a decreasing rate. It is...

We use exogenous variation in the degree of restrictions to bank competition across Italian provinces to study both the effects of bank regulation and the impact of deregulation. We find that where entry was more restricted the cost of credit was higher and - contrary to expectations - access to...

How much do cultural biases affect economic exchange? We try to answer this question by using the relative trust European citizens have for citizens of other countries. First, we document that this trust is affected not only by objective characteristics of the country being trusted, but also by...

We use survey data to study American households‘ propensity to default when the value of their mortgage exceeds the value of their house even if they can afford to pay their mortgage (strategic default). We find that 26% of the existing defaults are strategic. We also find that no household...

Is social capital long lasting? Does it affect long term economic performance? To answer these questions we test Putnam’s conjecture that today marked differences in social capital between the North and South of Italy were due to the culture of independence fostered by the free city-states...

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...