This article presents a new argument that links generalized social trust and collective action in situations with a large number of actors, who do not have specific information on each other. Generalized social trust enhances large-N cooperation through the social exchange heuristic, which...

In this paper we investigate the long-run relationship between disasters and societal trust. A growing body research suggests that factors such as income inequality, ethnic fractionalization, and religious heritage are important determinants of social capital in general, and trust in particular....

We examine the impact of natural disasters on economic growth by applying a synthetic control approach. In contrast to previous literature, we adopt a within-country perspective, which allows us to use richer and more comparable data and to better define the geographic area hit by the disaster....

Social, or 'generalized', trust refers to beliefs that people hold about how other people in society will in general act towards them. Can people in general be trusted? Or must one be careful in dealing with people? Research on the antecedents of social trust has typically relied on...

How should we interpret the World Values Survey (WVS) trust question? We conduct an experiment in India, a low trust country, to correlate the WVS trust question with trust decisions in an incentivized Trust Game. Evidence supports findings from one strand of the fractured literature - the WVS...