In this issue we feature 7 current papers on the theme of social capital:
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- Revealing the Economic Consequences of Group Cohesion - Simon Gaechter; Chris Starmer; Fabio Tufano
- Kinship Systems, Cooperation and the Evolution of Culture - Benjamin Enke
- Social capital and maternal health care use in rural Ethiopia - Sheabo Dessalegn, S.
- The local environment shapes refugee integration: Evidence from post-war Germany - Braun, Sebastian; Dwenger, Nadja
- Social ties and the demand for financial services - Eleonora Patacchini; Edoardo Rainone
- Using Aggregated Relational Data to Feasibly Identify Network Structure without Network Data - Emily Breza; Arun G. Chandrasekhar; Tyler H. McCormick; Mengjie Pan
- Polls, the Press, and Political Participation: The Effects of Anticipated Election Closeness on Voter Turnout - Leonardo Bursztyn; Davide Cantoni; Patricia Funk; Noam Yuchtman
1. Revealing the Economic Consequences of Group Cohesion
Simon Gaechter (School of Economics, University of Nottingham)
Chris Starmer (School of Economics, University of Nottingham)
Fabio Tufano (School of Economics, University of Nottingham) We introduce the concept of “group cohesion†to capture the economic consequences of ubiquitous social relationships in group production. We measure group cohesion, adapting the “oneness scale†from psychology. A comprehensive program of new experiments reveals the considerable economic impact of cohesion: higher cohesion groups are significantly more likely to achieve Pareto-superior outcomes in classic weak-link coordination games. We show that effects of cohesion are economically large, robust, and portable.
We identify social preferences as a primary mechanism explaining the effects of cohesion. Our results provide proof of concept for group cohesion as a productive new tool of economic research.
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:not:notcdx:2017-09&r=soc [2]
2. Kinship Systems, Cooperation and the Evolution of Culture
Benjamin Enke
Cultural psychologists and anthropologists argue that societies have developed heterogeneous systems of social organization to cope with social dilemmas, and that an entire bundle of cultural characteristics has coevolved to enforce cooperation within these different systems. This paper develops a measure of the historical tightness of kinship structures to provide empirical evidence for this large body of theories. In the data, societies with loose ancestral kinship ties cooperate and trust broadly, which is apparently sustained through a belief in moralizing gods, universally applicable moral principles, feelings of guilt, and large-scale institutions.
Societies with a historically tightly knit kinship structure, on the other hand, exhibit strong in-group favoritism: they cheat on and are distrusting of out-group members, but readily support in-group members in need. This cooperation scheme is enforced by moral values of in-group loyalty, conformity to tight social norms, emotions of shame, and strong local institutions. These relationships hold across historical ethnicities, contemporary countries, ethnicities within countries, and migrants. The results suggest that religious beliefs, language, emotions, morality, and social norms all coevolved to support specific social cooperation systems.
JEL: D0 O0
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23499&r=soc [3]
3. Social capital and maternal health care use in rural Ethiopia
Sheabo Dessalegn, S. (Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management)
This thesis analyzes the effect of social capital on maternal health care use in rural Ethiopia. Reports show that in Ethiopia, despite the huge investment in health infrastructure and the deployment of health professionals to provide maternal health services free of charge, utilization remains low.
Here we argue that one of the potential factors behind underutilization or inequality in use of the services is social capital. Social capital is important especially in the rural context, where access to modern means of information is low. Accordingly, this study analyzed the effect of social capital on maternal health care use, employing a broad definition of social capital. The findings show that the use of maternal health services cannot be fully explained using an individual perspective. They show that, among others, social capital is an important determinant for knowing the benefits of maternal health care and translating it into use. Also the findings show that different dimensions of social capital have different effects on maternal health care use. Thus free provision of the services may not ensure use if the potential users have poor knowledge about the services. In a nutshell, this study suggests that social capital is helpful in reducing maternal deaths. Therefore, there is a need to strengthen the current networking of mothers.
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tiu:tiutis:bb0ec225-4ec3-4028-90d6-1177499505f0&r=soc [4]
4. The local environment shapes refugee integration: Evidence from post-war Germany
Braun, Sebastian
Dwenger, Nadja
This paper studies how the local environment in receiving counties affected the economic, social, and political integration of the eight million expellees who arrived in West Germany after World War II. We first document that integration outcomes differed dramatically across West German counties.
We then show that more industrialized counties and counties with low expellee inflows were much more successful in integrating expellees than agrarian counties and counties with high in inflows. Religious differences between native West Germans and expellees had no effect on labor market outcomes, but reduced inter-marriage rates and increased the local support for anti-expellee parties.
Keywords: Expellees,Forced migration,Immigration,Integration,Post-War Germany
JEL: J15 J61 N34 C36
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:hohdps:102017&r=soc [5]
5. Social ties and the demand for financial services
Eleonora Patacchini (Cornell University)
Edoardo Rainone (Bank of Italy)
This paper studies the importance of social interactions for the adoption of financial services among young adults. Specifically, we investigate whether, how, and why financial decisions among interacting agents are correlated. We exploit a unique dataset of friendship networks in the United States and a novel estimation strategy that accounts for possibly endogenous network formation. We find that not all social contacts are equally important: only long-lasting relationships influence financial decisions. Moreover, this peer influence exists only in cohesive social structures. This evidence is consistent with an important role of trust in financial decisions. When agents consider whether or not to adopt a financial instrument, they face a risk and may place greater value on information coming from agents they trust. These results can help explain the importance of face-to-face social contacts for financial decisions.
Keywords: financial market participation, financial literacy, social interactions, trust, network formation, endogeneity, Bayesian estimation
JEL: C11 C31 D1 D14 D81 D85 G11 M31
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_1115_17&r=soc [6]
6. Using Aggregated Relational Data to Feasibly Identify Network Structure without Network Data
Emily Breza
Arun G. Chandrasekhar
Tyler H. McCormick
Mengjie Pan
Social network data is often prohibitively expensive to collect, limiting empirical network research. Typical economic network mapping requires (1) enumerating a census, (2) eliciting the names of all network links for each individual, (3) matching the list of social connections to the census, and
(4) repeating (1)-(3) across many networks. In settings requiring field surveys, steps (2)-(3) can be very expensive. In other network populations such as financial intermediaries or high-risk groups, proprietary data and privacy concerns may render (2)-(3) impossible. Both restrict the accessibility of high-quality networks research to investigators with considerable resources. We propose an inexpensive and feasible strategy for network elicitation using Aggregated Relational Data (ARD) – responses to questions of the form “How many of your social connections have trait k?” Our method uses ARD to recover the parameters of a general network formation model, which in turn, permits the estimation of any arbitrary node- or graph-level statistic. The method works well in simulations and in matching a range of network characteristics in real-world graphs from 75 Indian villages. Moreover, we replicate the results of two field experiments that involved collecting network data. We show that the researchers would have drawn similar conclusions using ARD alone. Finally, using calculations from J-PAL fieldwork, we show that in rural India, for example, ARD surveys are 80% cheaper than full network surveys.
JEL: C83 D85 L14
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23491&r=soc [7]
7. Polls, the Press, and Political Participation: The Effects of Anticipated
Election Closeness on Voter Turnout
Leonardo Bursztyn
Davide Cantoni
Patricia Funk
Noam Yuchtman
We exploit naturally occurring variation in the existence, closeness, and dissemination of pre-election polls to identify a causal effect of anticipated election closeness on voter turnout in Swiss referenda. Closer elections are associated with greater turnout only when polls exist.
Examining within-election variation in newspaper reporting on polls across cantons, we find that close polls increase turnout significantly more where newspapers report on them most. This holds examining only "incidental"
exposure to coverage by periodicals whose largest audience is elsewhere. The introduction of polls had larger effects in politically unrepresentative municipalities, where locally available information differs most from national polls.
JEL: D72 P16
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23490&r=soc [8]
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