Regional Trust as a Signal of Local Trustworthiness: Evidence from Migrants

Gianluca Grimalda and Diego Marino-Fages ()
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Diego Marino-Fages: University of Durham
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Diego Raul Marino Fages

No 2026_14, Department of Economics Working Papers from Durham University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Beliefs about trustworthiness shape exchange, cooperation, and economic development. Kim, Putterman, and Zhang (2022) show experimentally that people draw similar inferences from observed trust and trustworthiness. We test whether these signals are similarly predictive outside the laboratory using TrustLab data on 518 first-generation migrants from 83 origin countries living in 128 regions across six OECD destination countries. A one-standard-deviation increase in native regional trust is associated with a 0.19-standard-deviation increase in migrants’ expected trustworthiness, conditional on regional trustworthiness, whose coefficient is near zero. The results are consistent with migrants using local trusting behavior as a signal of trustworthiness.

Keywords: advice networks; Trust; trustworthiness; belief formation; migrants; social learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 F22 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09
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