Long-Lasting Social Capital and its Impact on Economic Development: The Legacy of the Commons

Daniel Montolio and Ana Tur-Prats ()
Additional contact information
Ana Tur-Prats: Department of Economics, University of California, Merced.
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Ana Tur-Prats

No XREAP2018-8, Working Papers from Xarxa de Referència en Economia Aplicada (XREAP)

Abstract: This paper analyzes the historical determinants and long-term persistence of social capital, as well as its effect on economic development, by looking at the legacy of the commons in a Spanish region. In medieval times, common goods were granted to townships and were managed collectively by local citizens. This enabled the establishment of institutions for collective action and self-government. Common goods persisted until the second half of the nineteenth century. We argue that the experience of cooperation among villagers, repeated over the centuries, increased the social capital in each local community. In 1845, a law forced small villages to merge with others, a fact which generated exogenous variation in the number of mergers (i.e., cooperative networks) that each modern municipality was required to have. We exploit this change in an IV and RD setting and find that current municipalities formed by a greater number of old townships have a denser network of associations. We also find that higher social capital is associated with more economic development.

Keywords: collective action; self-government; long-term persistence; common goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H49 N90 P48 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2018-11, Revised 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gro, nep-his, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.xreap.cat/RePEc/xrp/pdf/XREAP2018-08.pdf First version, 2018 (application/pdf)
http://www.xreap.cat/RePEc/xrp/pdf/XREAP2018-08.pdf Revised version, 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Long-lasting social capital and its impact on economic development: the legacy of the commons (2018)
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:xrp:wpaper:xreap2018-8

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Xarxa de Referència en Economia Aplicada (XREAP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by XREAP ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).