This paper investigates empirically the determinants of individuals' attitudes towards preventing environmental damage in Spain using data from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey for the periods 1990, 1995 and 1999/2000. Compared to many previous studies, we present a richer set...

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...

Social capital can be understood as network-based civic engagement, based on reciprocity and trust. This sociological approach, however, is faced with problems when assuming network-based social capital as a stock of capital. Any form of capital should have a positive economic payoff, should be...

Social trust is increasingly seen as an important determinant of economic growth and social prosperity in regions and nations. Even in a comparatively homogeneous area such as Europe, there are stark sub-national differences in levels of generalized trust. It is thus of crucial importance to...

In this paper we test the celebrated `Strength of weak ties' theory of Granovetter (1973). We test two hypotheses on the network structure in a data set of collaborating economists. While we find support for the hypothesis of transitivity of strong ties, we reject the hypothesis that weak ties...

I establish a positive relationship between family ties and civic virtues, as captured by disapproval of tax and benefit cheating, corruption, and a range of other dimensions of exploiting others for personal gain. I find that family ties are a complement to social capital, using within country...

Empirical studies have shown that preferences for redistribution are significantly correlated with expectations of future mobility and the belief that society offers equal opportunities. We add to previous research by investigating the role of individual and social norms on rent seeking. We find...

Empirical results based on individual-level data from Japan were studied to determine the effect of social capital on the willingness to leave one's residential area. It was found that social capital accumulated through one's own experience in a residential area is not the only factor that...

For a cross-section of 123 European regions, we find evidence for a positive effect of generalized trust on regional innovation activity. We aim to identify causal effects by using instrumental variables from climate and soil data, drawing from recent literature on the effects of climate on...