We develop an evolutionary model of growth in which agents choose how to allocate their time between private and social activities. We argue that a shift from social to private activities may foster market-based growth, but also generate social poverty. Within a formal framework that merges a...

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...

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;...

We use detailed data from Indonesian cities to study how variation in density within urban areas affects social capital. For identification, we instrument density with soil characteristics, and control for community averages of observed characteristics. Under plausible assumptions, these...

The nexus between social leisure and life satisfaction is riddled with endogeneity problems. In investigating the causal relationship going from the first to the second variable we start from considering that retirement is an event after which the time investable in (the outside job) relational...

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the variation of subjective well-being experienced by Germans over the last two decades testing the role of some of the major correlates of people's well-being. Our results suggest that the variation of Germans' well-being...

Putnam (1995)'s seminal work was one of the first to describe the decline of social capital in the US after the 1960s, a period that saw a large increase in the flow of immigrants into the US. Using the Volunteer Supplement of the September Sample of the Current Population Survey (CPS) between...

We set up a theoretical framework to analyze the possible role of economic growth and technological progress in the erosion of social capital. Under certain parameters, the relationship between technological progress and social capital can take the shape of an inverted U curve. We show the...

This paper contributes to the literature by carrying out the first econometric investigation into the role of television in the formation of political consensus in Italy. Based on probit and instrumental variables estimates, we find trust in television to be the most significant predictor of...