An ignored aspect of efforts to save Jewish citizens in occupied Europe during World War II is that large-scale rescue arguably constitutes a collective action problem. Due to Nazi occupation, no formal institutions contributed to solving this problem. Exploring the differences in rescue rates...

Guilds are social scientists' favoured historical example of institutions generating a "social capital" of trust that benefited entire economies. This article considers this view in the light of empirical findings for early modern Europe. It draws the distinction between a "particularized" trust...

The multiple crises observed in the European Union over the past decade have undermined trust and the foundations for cohesion in Europe. In the absence of a common government, confederations without strong common independent institutions are fragile and prone to collapse. Some of the observed...

Recent research has indicated that the variations in generalized trust have deep historical roots. This paper argues that geopolitical history may be an important determinant of modern levels of trust. Specifically, regions that have historically been dominated by states of different sizes may...

This paper examines the effect of historical changes in political borders on culture, specifically levels of trust in political institutions. The identification strategy is to focus on regions that are part of the same country today and, therefore, share the same political institutions, but have...

Trust offices (administratiekantoren) that repackage securities have been a central institution in Dutch finance since the late eighteenth century. Their basic form and functioning have remained largely the same, but over time, the repackaging has come to serve a variety of very different...

Trust offices (in Dutch: administratiekantoren) that repackage securities have been a central institution in Dutch finance since the late eighteenth century. Their basic form and functioning have remained largely the same, but over time, the repackaging has come to serve a variety of very...

In this paper we develop a new empirical approach to uncovering the impact of social attitudes on economic development. We first show that trust of second-generation Americans is significantly influenced by the country of origin of their forebears. In the spirit of the epidemiology literature,...

Money is a social convention where one party accepts it as payment in the expectation that others will do so too. Over the ages, various forms of private money have come and gone, giving way to central bank money. The reasons for the resilience of central bank money are of particular interest...

The principal focus in the substantial literature on impediments to economic development has been on the inadequacies of policies and governance. However, successful economic development requires effectiveness of markets and incentives for investment, which in turn require trust. This paper...