This article establishes that there are significant social influences on the decisions made by individuals about whether to trust others. These social interactions effects may arise from exogenous-environmental characteristics or from endogenous effects that make people conform to the particular...

Many social democrats believe that the failure of past government interventions in social and economic life can be explained by the absence of social capital, and that government must intervene to create that social capital. This argument is comprehensively undermined in this Hobart Paper. The...

This paper investigates the relation between social capital and crime. The analysis contributes to explaining why crime is so heterogeneous across space. By employing current and historical data for Dutch municipalities and by providing novel indicators to measure social capital, we find a link...

This paper examines the individual incentives to identify to one's ethnic group rather than to the nation, based on large sample surveys representative of seven capitals of West-African countries. Three main driving forces stand out. First, we show that education brings down ethnic salience at...

This paper examines the individual determinants of ethnic identication using large sample surveys (about 30,000 respondents) representative of seven capitals of West-African countries. A small model that relates ethnic identication to an investment in ethnic capital suggests that individuals...

This paper examines the individual determinants of ethnic identification using large sample surveys (about 30,000 respondents) representative of seven capitals of West-African countries. A small model that relates ethnic identification to an investment in ethnic capital suggests that individuals...

This paper investigates the relation between social capital and crime. The analysis contributes to explaining why crime is so heterogeneous across space. By employing current and historical data for Dutch municipalities and by providing novel indicators to measure social capital, we find a link...

This research shows that social capital is important in explaining why crime is so heterogeneous across space. Social capital is considered as a latent construct composed of a variety of indicators, such as blood donations, voter turnout, voluntary contributions to community well-being, and...

Two of the most influential concepts in social science over the past two decades have been 'social embeddedness' and 'social capital'. This essay introduces a special issue of the Review of Austrian Economics in which those concepts are examined from the perspective provided by Austrian...