What are the roots of social capital and how can it be measured and built? Social capital is considered as a new production factor which must be added to the conventional concepts of human and physical capital. Social capital is productive because it increases the level of trust in a society and...

The transistion of the "Old Communist" countries of East and Central Europe has been disappointingly slow given the amount of physical and human capital available at the start of the transition. We argue that this slowness is caused by the lack of social capital, which is an important factor of...

This paper analyses lawyer's choices of law in international sales contracts. It identifies key reasons for opting in or out of the CISG across different jurisdictions. The paper then examines aspects of this choice from economic and psychological perspectives: from the ability to externalize...

Why do lawyers in some jurisdictions continue to ‘automatically’ exclude the 1980 UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) in their choices of law for international sales contracts? Why do lawyers in other jurisdictions approach the decision very differently? Why...

This paper builds a bridge between certain of the most basic principles of economics and those of evolutionary biology. It begins by extending Ronald Coase’s “The Nature of the Firm” to an investigation of how, as their environment evolves, species achieve adaptive efficiency by...

We develop a two-sector model to analyze which kind of social <p> organization generates trust. Social capital is de…ned as trust. We examine two <p> communities: the bedroom community in which people commute long distance <p> to work and the virility community in which people do not commute to work. <p>...</p></p></p></p>

Social capital is often represented by generalized trust - the degree to which one trusts "most (unknown) people". It is assumed to be enhanced by diverse group interactions. In the social capital literature, it is opposed by particularized trust, which represents our mutual confidence in...

Aiming to explain the European divide with respect to social and political values, scholars in the past have relied on a simplified four- (or even two-) dimensional regime model which tranches the continent according to the social capacities of its inhabitants. This "cartography" of "Social...

In Europe differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs - increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal...

Since 1972 the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a representative sample of US adults "… [are] you…very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" Overall, the population is reasonably happy even after a mild recent decline. I focus on differences along standard socio demographic...