EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Social Capital, Social Norms and the New Institutional Economics

Philip Keefer and Stephen Knack

Chapter 27 in Handbook of New Institutional Economics, 2008, pp 701-725 from Springer

Abstract: Douglass North (1990) describes institutions as the rules of the game that set limits on human behavior, now a universally-accepted definition. North and others especially underline the crucial role of informal social norms. They predict that, like all rules of the game, social norms should affect the economic prosperity enjoyed by individuals and countries—that they should have a crucial impact, for example, on economic and political development. In fact, substantial evidence demonstrates that social norms prescribing cooperative or trustworthy behavior have a significant impact on whether societies can overcome obstacles to contracting and collective action that would otherwise hinder their development. Much of this evidence comes from outside the new institutional economics, emerging instead from scholarly research in the field of “social capital.” A review of this evidence, and its implications for our understanding of the role of social norms and institutions, is therefore the focus of this chapter.

Keywords: Social Capital; Public Good; Social Norm; Collective Action; Institutional Economic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Chapter: Social Capital, Social Norms and the New Institutional Economics (2005)
Working Paper: Social capital, social norms and the New Institutional Economics (2004) Downloads
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:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-69305-5_28

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783540693055

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-69305-5_28

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-69305-5_28