Civic Capital as the Missing Link

Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales

No 15845, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs that help cooperation--which for clarity we label civic capital. We argue that this definition differentiates social capital from human capital and satisfies the properties of the standard notion of capital. We then argue that civic capital can explain why differences in economic performance persist over centuries and discuss how the effect of civic capital can be distinguished empirically from other variables that affect economic performance and its persistence, including institutions and geography.

JEL-codes: O43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-hpe, nep-hrm and nep-soc
Note: EEE POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (131)

Published as Guiso, Luigi, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales. 2011. "Civic Capital as the Missing Link." In Social Economics Handbook, edited by Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin and Matthew O. Jackson, vol. 1, 417-480. Elsevier.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15845.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Civic Capital as the Missing Link (2010)
Working Paper: Civic Capital as the Missing Link (2010)
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:15845

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15845

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 ().