This paper analyzes the effectiveness of social capital in reducing the negative externalities associated with stress, as well as the physical and psychological strain indicators among police officers. Despite the fact that there is a large multidisciplinary literature on stress or on social...

This paper combines an economic experiment with survey data to investigate determinants of trust and trustworthiness in the Dutch society. We contrast the inferences which can be made on the trust propensity using stated and revealed measures and we test for participation bias in our experiment....

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...

We examine the effect of generalized trust on long-term economic growth. Unlike in previous studies, we use Bayesian model averaging to deal rigorously with model uncertainty and attendant omitted variable bias. In addition, we address endogeneity and assess whether the effect of trust on growth...

Transaction costs are a major reason why international trade flows are much smaller than traditional trade theory would suggest. Trust between trading partners lowers transaction costs and may therefore enhance trade. The empirical analysis of this paper shows that more trust leads to more trade...

Economists increasingly pay attention to social capital as an important determinant of macroeconomic growth performance. At the same time, there is discussion regarding the robustness of the results of empirical growth studies. In a seminal paper, Knack and Keefer (1997) assess the effect of...

Recent theoretical contributions depart from the usual practice of treating individual attitude endowments as a black box, by assuming that these are shaped by the attitudes of parents and other role models. Attitudes include fundamental preferences such as risk preference, and crucial beliefs...

The level of trust inherent in a society is important for a wide range of microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper investigates how individuals' attitudes toward social and institutional trust are shaped by the political regime in which they live. The German reunification is a unique...