College Education and social trust. An Evidence-based Study on the Causal Mechanisms

J. Huang, H. Maassen van den Brink and W. Groot
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Jikun Huang and Jian Huang

No 23, Working Papers from Top Institute for Evidence Based Education Research

Abstract: This paper examines the influence of college education on social trust at the individual level. Based on the literature of trust and social trust, we hypothesize that life experience/development since adulthood and perceptions of cultural/social structures are two primary channels in the causal linkage between college education and social trust. In the first part of the empirical study econometric techniques are employed to tackle the omitted-variable problem and substantial evidence is found to confirm the positive effect of college education. In the second part contemporary information is used to examine the hypothetical mechanisms in the causal inference. That life experience is a primary channel via which college education promotes social trust fails to find support in our examination, while individual perceptions of cultural and social structures explain up to 77 percent of the causal effect.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tierweb.nl/assets/files/UvA/College%20E ... al%20trust.final.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.tierweb.nl:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
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:tir:wpaper:23

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Top Institute for Evidence Based Education Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jessica Segal ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).