Combined with the expansion of economic literature on the role of ethnicity, new indices were developed to do justice to its complexity. The current indices are generally based on pre-defined groups, disregarding the (dis)similarities between them. This is sufficient to calculate the most common...

We validate survey measures of social capital with a new data set that examines whether citizens report a lost wallet to its owner. Using data from more than 17,000 lost wallets across 40 countries, we find that survey measures of social capital - especially questions concerning generalized...

Interpersonal trust (i.e. trust in other people) is an issue of high interest to both policy-makers and researchers seeking to understand what drives social and economic outcomes. However, for trust to usefully inform policy and analysis it is necessary to have valid and reliable measures of it....

Combined with the expansion of economic literature on the role of ethnicity, new indices were developed to do justice to its complexity. The current indices are generally based on pre-defined groups, disregarding the (dis)similarities between them. This is sufficient to calculate the most common...

Data on cultural differences between countries based on the definitions developed by Geert Hofstede are now available for more than 80 countries. Data on six structural economic indicators published by the World Bank - ease of doing business, enforcement of contracts, control of corruption,...

If the global brain is a suitable model of the future information society, then one future of research in this global brain will be in its past, which is its distributed memory. In this paper, we draw on Francis Heylighen, Marta Lenartowicz, and Niklas Luhmann to show that future research in...

We explore the interrelationships between various measures of cultural distance. We first discuss measures of genetic distance, used in the recent economics literature to capture the degree of relatedness between countries. We next describe several classes of measures of lin-guistic, religious,...

We validate survey measures of social capital with a new data set that examines whether citizens report a lost wallet to its owner. Using data from more than 17,000 lost wallets across 40 countries, we find that survey measures of social capital - especially questions concerning generalized...

Existing indices of ethnic diversity are generally based on pre-defined groups, disregarding the (dis)similarities between them. This paper proposes an index that includes the dissimilarity in language, ethno-racial characteristcs and religion between groups. The resulting distance-adjusted...

Religious adherence has been hard to study in part because it is hard to measure. We develop a new measure of religious adherence, which is granular in both time and space, using anonymized mobile phone transaction records. After validating the measure with traditional data, we show how it can...