While strong social ties help individuals cope with missing institutions, trade is essentially limited to those who are part of the social network. We examine what makes the decision to trust a stranger different from the decision to trust a member of a given social network (a friend), by...

While strong social ties help individuals cope with missing institutions, trade is essentially limited to those who are part of the social network. We examine what makes the decision to trust a stranger different from the decision to trust a member of a given social network (a friend), by...

Social media have been credited with the potential of reinvigorating trust by offering new opportunities for social and political participation. This view has been recently challenged by the rising phenomenon of online incivility, which has made the environment of social networking sites hostile...

We develop a dynamic framework of strategic information transmission through cheap talk in a social network. Privately informed agents have different preferences about the action to be implemented by each agent and repeatedly communicate with their neighbors in the network. We first characterize...

This paper argues that welfare programs are linked with the destruction of social capital, as measured by interpersonal trust in laboratory games. The paper employs experimental data for representative samples of individuals in four Latin American capital cities (Bogota, Lima, Montevideo, and...

This paper argues that welfare programs are linked with the destruction of social capital, as measured by interpersonal trust in laboratory games. The paper employs experimental data for representative samples of individuals in four Latin American capital cities (Bogota, Lima, Montevideo, and...

Abstract: This essay makes a conceptual distinction between societal categories, such as social networks, norms, and social status differentiation, on the one hand, and social capital, on the other. The former are institutional phenomena arising as outcomes of social-exchange games in which...