Social capital and the spread of Covid-19: Insights from European countries

Alina Kristin Bartscher, Sebastian Seitz, Michaela Slotwinski, Nils Wehrhöfer and Sebastian Siegloch

No 20-023, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: We explore the role of social capital in the spread of the recent Covid-19 pan­demic in independent analyses for Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Swe­den, Switzerland and the UK. We exploit within-country variation in social capital and Covid-19 cases to show that high-social-capital areas accumulated between 12% and 32% fewer Covid-19 cases per capita from mid-March until mid-May. Using Italy as a case study, we find that high-social-capital areas exhibit lower excess mortality and a decline in mobility. Our results have important implications for the design of local containment policies in future waves of the pandemic.

Keywords: Covid-19; social capital; collective action; health costs; Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 D04 D91 H11 H12 I10 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hea and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (46)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/218893/1/1699057648.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Social capital and the spread of covid-19: Insights from european countries (2021)
Working Paper: Social capital and the spread of Covid-19: Insights from European countries (2020)
Working Paper: Social Capital and the Spread of Covid-19: Insights from European Countries (2020)
Working Paper: Social capital and the spread of Covid-19: Insights from European countries (2020)
Working Paper: Social Capital and the Spread of COVID-19: Insights from European Countries (2020)
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:zbw:zewdip:20023

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().