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...

Obgleich Vertrauen seit jeher allgegenwärtiges Motiv im literarischen Diskurs über eine effektiv funktionierende Gesellschaft ist, hat die Beachtung von Vertrauen mit der Finanzkrise 2008 deutlich an Dynamik gewonnen. Eine Reihe an Unternehmenskrisen hat beträchtlich zu dieser graduellen...

Dieser Beitrag ist das Ergebnis eines sechs Monate langen Studienprojekts, durchgeführt an der Fakultät für Wirtschafts- und Organisationswissenschaften (WOW) an der Universität der Bundeswehr München. Gemeinsam mit 17 (männlichen und weiblichen) Studenten hat das "akademische Team",...

We present new evidence on the influence of income inequality on generalized trust. Using individual panel data from Swedish counties together with an instrumental variable strategy we find that differences in disposable income, and especially differences among people in the bottom half of the...

We conduct an extensive robustness analysis of the relationship between trust and growth for a later time period (the 1990s) and with a bigger sample (63 countries) than previous studies. In addition to robustness tests that focus on model uncertainty, we use Least Trimmed Squares, a robust...

We present new evidence on how generalized trust is formed. Unlike previous studies, we look at the explanatory power of economic institutions, we use newer data, we incorporate more countries, and we use instrumental variables to handle the causality problem. A central result is that legal...

In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's expectation about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. Recent experimental studies as well as surveys have asked participants to state their beliefs explicitly, but little is known about the causal relation...