The Moldable Young: How Institutions Impact Social Trust

Andreas Bergh and Richard Öhrvall ()

No 1132, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: Social trust is linked to many desirable economic and social outcomes, but the causality between trust and institutions is debated. Using new data from a representative sample of 2,668 Swedish expatriates (surveyed in the SOM Institute’s Swedish Expatriate Survey 2014), we use variation in time spent in the new country to infer about the effect of country level institutions and norms (such as corruption perceptions, average trust levels and various aspects of economic freedom) on social trust. The results suggest that individual trust suffers in countries with high corruption, low trust and low legal quality. The effect is relatively small, occurs mainly during the first 3 to 10 years and is observed only among those aged less than 30 at the time of arrival in the new country. The results are robust to controlling for a large array of individual characteristics (including age), and support the view that social trust is sensitive to events that occur early in life. In contrast, after the age of approximately 30, trust seems to be a highly resilient personal trait.

Keywords: Trust; Social norms; Institutions; Migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 D83 J62 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2016-09-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hpe and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp1132.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1132

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elisabeth Gustafsson ().