Social Capital as Good Culture

Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales

No 13712, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: To explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical experiences of cooperation (Putnam 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others. We show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively conservative priors. As a result, societies can be trapped in a low-trust equilibrium. In this context, a temporary shock to the return to trusting can have a permanent effect on the level of trust. We validate the model by testing its predictions on the World Values Survey data and the German Socio Economic Panel. We also present some anecdotal evidence that differences in priors across regions are reflected in the spirit of the novels that originate from those regions.

JEL-codes: E0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-mac and nep-soc
Note: POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (44)

Published as Luigi Guiso & Paola Sapienza & Luigi Zingales, 2008. "Alfred Marshall Lecture Social Capital as Good Culture," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(2-3), pages 295-320, 04-05.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13712.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Social Capital as Good Culture (2008)
Working Paper: Social Capital as Good Culture (2007)
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:nbr:nberwo:13712

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13712

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().