Although social capital has been considered of the utmost importance for development and poverty alleviation by governments and NGOs, it remains a complex and elusive concept. Different dimensions of social capital form part of the puzzle: cooperation is an individual other-regarding preference;...

In the year 2007 It was held the research project called “Measuring Trust, Trustworthiness and Pro-Sociality in Six Latin American Cities”: Bogotá, D.C, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Lima, Montevideo and San José de Costa Rica. The purpose of this study was to analyze the interaction between...

While there is a large literature about the importance of social capital and its impact on economic and social flourishing, much less is known about the relevance of the arts and creative communities as inputs to social capital. Using cross-sectional variation in the exposure of different...

The change of the political regime from the socialist central planning system to a market economy and pluralistic society required the reorganisation not only of agricultural production, but also of the organisations in their support. In the Czech Republic, agricultural production is...

Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One...

I empirically assess the importance of socially interdependent origin cultures as opposed to socially independent ones for network effects in inter-national migration. I propose that societies that emphasise collectivist behaviour accumulate larger levels of communityspecific social capital than...

We establish an inverse relationship between family ties, generalized trust and political participation. The more individuals rely on the family as a provider of services, insurance, transfer of resources, the lower is civic engagement and political participation. The latter, together with...

China is the odd man out in the research on social capital and economic performance. A brief survey of recent World Values Survey data depicts China to be a high-trust, achievement oriented society, which does not fit into popular pictures of rampant corruption and abuses of power. I argue that...

The German educational system finds itself being criticized by the OECD in its Programme for International Student Assessment. Family background would heavily influence children's academic achievements. A child stemming from a high class family has a 3.1 times higher chance to go to secondary...

The first aim of this paper is to clarify the differences and rela-tionships between cumulative advantage/disadvantage and the Matthew ef-fect. Its second aim, which is also its main contribution, is not only to present a new measure of the Matthew effect, but also to show how to esti-mate this...