Inequality and Trust in Sweden: Some Inequalities are More Harmful than Others

Magnus Gustavsson () and Henrik Jordahl ()

No 106, Ratio Working Papers from The Ratio Institute

Abstract: 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 income distribution, are associated with lower trust. The relationship between income inequality and trust is particularly strong for people with a strong aversion against income differentials. We also find that the proportion of people born in a foreign country is negatively associated with trust.

Keywords: trust; social capital; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 D31 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc
Date: 2006-10-18
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (5) Track citations by RSS feed

Published in Journal of Public Economics, 2008, pages 348-365.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ratio.se/pdf/wp/hj_mg_trust.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Inequality and trust in Sweden: Some inequalities are more harmful than others (2008)
Working Paper: Inequality and Trust in Sweden: Some Inequalities are More Harmful than Others (2006)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:ratioi:0106

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Ratio Working Papers from The Ratio Institute
Address: The Ratio Institute, P.O. Box 5095, SE-102 42 Stockholm, Sweden
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Martin Korpi ().