This paper explores the extent to which individuals trust, reciprocate, cooperate and pool risk by using a battery of field experiments containing the trust game, the voluntary contributions mechanism and the risk pooling game; applied in six capital cities in Latin America. The results suggest...

This paper surveys evidence on discrimination in Latin America and shows that there is a widespread perception of discrimination, especially against the poor, the uneducated and those who lack connections. The channels through which discrimination occurs may be built on the basis of economic...

This paper argues that welfare programs are linked with the destruction of social capital, as measured by interpersonal trust in laboratory games. The paper employs experimental data for representative samples of individuals in four Latin American capital cities (Bogota, Lima, Montevideo, and...

A common premise in both the theoretical and policy literatures on development is that people remain poor because they are too impatient to save and too risk averse to take the sort of chances needed to accumulate wealth. The empirical literature, however, suggests that this assumption is far...