Guilds are social scientists' favoured historical example of institutions generating a "social capital" of trust that benefited entire economies. This article considers this view in the light of empirical findings for early modern Europe. It draws the distinction between a "particularized" trust...

Do legal institutions affect norms of cooperation? Using the introduction of the Code Napoleon during the Napoleonic Wars in Germany as a historical experiment, I show that a positive shock to the quality of legal institutions can increase social-capital long-lastingly. I find that individuals...

Do legal institutions affect norms of cooperation? Using the introduction of the Code Napoleon during the Napoleonic Wars in Germany as a historical experiment, I show that a positive shock to the quality of legal institutions can increase social-capital long-lastingly. I find that individuals...

In this paper we develop a new empirical approach to uncovering the impact of social attitudes on economic development. We first show that trust of second-generation Americans is significantly influenced by the country of origin of their forebears. In the spirit of the epidemiology literature,...

This note replicates the analysis of Tabellini (2010) on the relationship between social capital and regional economic growth in Europe, extending that work and the underlying dataset by focusing on the spatial dimension of social capital and introducing a definition of contiguity among European...

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. This influential literature marks a promising development but has drawn criticism. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots....

The persistence literature in economics and related disciplines connects recent outcomes to events long ago. This influential literature marks a promising development but has drawn criticism. We discuss two prominent examples that ground the rise of the Nazi Party in distant historical roots....

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...