What do cross-country surveys tell us about social capital?

David Tannenbaum, Alain Cohn, Christian Lukas Zünd and Michel Maréchal

No 352, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: We assess the predictive power of survey measures of social capital with a new behavioral data set that examines whether citizens report a lost wallet to its owner. Using data from more than 17,000 “lost” wallets across 40 countries, we find that survey measures of social capital - especially questions concerning generalized trust or generalized morality - are strongly and significantly correlated with country-level differences in wallet reporting rates. A second finding is that lost wallet reporting rates predict unique variation in the outputs of social capital, such as economic development and government effectiveness, not captured by existing measures.

Keywords: Social capital; trust; honesty; field experiment; surveys (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 C93 O10 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06, Revised 2022-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-exp and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: What Do Cross-Country Surveys Tell Us About Social Capital? (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:econwp:352

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