In this issue we feature 11 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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In this issue we have:

1. Redistribution through Charity and Optimal Taxation when People are Concerned with Social Status - Aronsson, Thomas; Johansson-Stenman, Olof; Wendner, Ronald
2. Co-worker networks, labour mobility, and productivity growth in regions - Balazs Lengyel; Rikard Eriksson
3. A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior - Martin Korndörfer; Boris Egloff; Stefan C. Schmukle
4. Measuring the interaction dimension of segregation: the Gini-Exposure index - Francesco Andreoli; Claudio Zoli
5. Money and the Scale of Cooperation - Maria Bigoni; Gabriele Camera; Marco Casari
6. Redistribution Through Charity, and Optimal Taxation when People are Concerned with Social Status - Thomas Aronsson; Olof Johansson-Stenman; Ronald Wendner
7. Do reciprocators exploit or resist moral wiggle room? An experimental analysis - Tobias Regner; Astrid Matthey
8. Psychology of Trust: A Three Component Analytical Framework to Explain the Impact of Formal Institutions on Social Trust Formation - Tamilina, Larysa; Tamilina, Natalya
9. Digital Trust, Platforms, and Policy - Seppälä, Timo; Mattila, Juri
10. What Aspects of Society Affect the Quality of Life of a Minority? Global Evidence from the New Gay Happiness Index -   Berggren, Niclas; Nilsson, Therese; Bjørnskov, Christian
11. Particularism and Universalism in Russian Post-Soviet Foreign Policy: Russia’S Discourse on Humanitarian Cooperation in the CIS - Natalia N. Morozova

 1. Redistribution through Charity and Optimal Taxation when People are Concerned with Social Status

    Aronsson, Thomas (Department of Economics, Umeå University)

    Johansson-Stenman, Olof (Department of Economics, School of Business,

     Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden)

    Wendner, Ronald (Department of Economics, University of Graz, Austria)  This paper deals with tax policy responses to charitable giving based on a  model of optimal redistributive income taxation. The major contribution is  the simultaneous treatment of (i) warm-glow and stigma effects of charitable  donations; (ii) that the warm glow of giving and stigma of receiving charity  may to some extent depend on relative comparisons; and (iii) that people are  also concerned with their relative consumption more generally. Whether  charity should be taxed or supported turns out to largely depend on the  relative strengths of the warm glow of giving and the stigma of receiving  charity, respectively, and on the positional externalities caused by  charitable donations. In addition, imposing stigma on the mimicker (via a  relaxation of the self-selection constraint) strengthens the case for  subsidizing charity. We also consider a case where the government is unable  to target the charitable giving through a direct tax instrument, and examine  how the optimal marginal income tax structure is adjusted in response to  charitable giving.

    Keywords: Conspicuous consumption; conspicuous charitable giving; optimal

     income taxation; warm glow; stigma

    JEL: D03 D62 H21 H23

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:umnees:0919&r=soc

 2. Co-worker networks, labour mobility, and productivity growth in regions

    Balazs Lengyel (Institute of Economics - Centre for Economic and Regional

     Studies - Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

    Rikard Eriksson (Department of Geography and Economic History, Umea

     University)

 This paper provides a new empirical perspective for analysing the role of  social networks for an economic geography approach on regional economic  growth by constructing large-scale networks from employee-employee  co-occurrences in plants in the entire Swedish economy 1990-2008. We  calculate the probability of employee-employee ties at plant level based on  homophily-biased random network assumptions and trace the most probable  relations of every employee over the full period. Then, we look at the  inter-plant ties for the 1995-2008 period because the network is already well  developed after five years of edge construction. We argue that these personal  acquaintances are important for local learning opportunities and consequently  for regional growth. Indeed, the estimated panel Vector Autoregressive models  provide the first systematic evidence for a central claim in economic

 geography: social network density has positive effect on regional  productivity growth. The results are robust against removing the old and  therefore weak ties from the network. Interestingly, the positive effect of  density on growth was found in a segment of the co-worker network as well, in  which plants have never been linked by labour mobility previously.

    Keywords: social network, homophily, probability of ties, labour mobility,

     regional productivity growth, panel vector autoregression

    JEL: D85 J24 J61 R11 R23

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:has:discpr:1550&r=soc

 3. A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior

    Martin Korndörfer (University of Leipzig)

    Boris Egloff (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)

    Stefan C. Schmukle (University of Leipzig)  Does being from a higher social class lead a person to engage in more or less  prosocial behavior? Psychological research has recently provided support for  a negative effect of social class on prosocial behavior. However, research  outside the field of psychology has mainly found evidence for positive or  u-shaped relations. In the present research, we therefore thoroughly examined  the effect of social class on prosocial behavior. Moreover, we analyzed  whether this effect was moderated by the kind of observed prosocial behavior,  the observed country, and the measure of social class. Across eight studies  with large and representative international samples, we predominantly found  positive effects of social class on prosociality: Higher class individuals  were more likely to make a charitable donation and contribute a higher  percentage of their family income to charity (32,090 >= N >= 3,957; Studies  1–3), were more likely to volunteer (37,136 >= N >= 3,964; Studies 4–6), were  more helpful (N = 3,902; Study 7), and were more trusting and trustworthy in  an economic game when interacting with a stranger (N = 1,421; Study 8) than  lower social class individuals. Although the effects of social class varied  somewhat across the kinds of prosocial behavior, countries, and measures of  social class, under no condition did we find the negative effect that would  have been expected on the basis of previous results reported in the  psychological literature. Possible explanations for this divergence and  implications are discussed.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jgu:wpaper:1521&r=soc

 4. Measuring the interaction dimension of segregation: the Gini-Exposure index

    Francesco Andreoli (Department of Economics (University of Verona))

    Claudio Zoli (Department of Economics (University of Verona))  We study the heterogeneity of social interaction profiles among individuals  and define the extent of the interaction dimension of segregation. An  interaction profile quantifies the probabilities that one individual has to  interact with different social groups. It can be inferred, for instance, from  observation of social ties through networks data. Heterogeneity is minimal if  everybody exhibit the same profile, and is maximal if everybody interacts  with only one group. All the in-between configurations can be ordered on the  bases of an intuitive principle based on operation that generate mixtures of  interaction profiles. We proposes a characterization of the Gini-exposure  index to assess heterogeneity in interaction patters in a society. One key  advantage of this index is that overall heterogeneity can be decomposed into  the segregation experienced by every individual with respect to other people  in his own group (isolation) or in other groups (exposure). An preliminary  empirical investigation of interaction patterns of natives and immigrants  across Italian municipalities reveals connections and differences with other  exposure measures.

    Keywords: Interaction, segregation, dissimilarity, Gini index.

    JEL: J71 D31 D63 C16

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ver:wpaper:30/2015&r=soc

 5. Money and the Scale of Cooperation

    Maria Bigoni (University of Bologna)

    Gabriele Camera (Chapman University & University of Basel)

    Marco Casari (University of Bologna & IZA)

    Keywords: Endogenous institutions, experiments, repeated games, strategic

     uncertainty

    JEL: C70 C90 D03 E02

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chu:wpaper:15-28&r=soc

 6. Redistribution Through Charity, and Optimal Taxation when People are Concerned with Social Status

    Thomas Aronsson (Umea University)

    Olof Johansson-Stenman (University of Gothenburg)

    Ronald Wendner (University of Graz)

 This paper deals with tax policy responses to charitable giving based on a  model of optimal redistributive income taxation. The major contribution is  the simultaneous treatment of (i) warm-glow and stigma effects of charitable  donations; (ii) that the warm glow of giving and stigma of receiving charity  may to some extent depend on relative comparisons; and (iii) that people are  also concerned with their relative consumption more generally. Whether  charity should be taxed or supported turns out to largely depend on the  relative strengths of the warm glow of giving and the stigma of receiving  charity, respectively, and on the positional externalities caused by  charitable donations. In addition, imposing stigma on the mimicker (via a  relaxation of the self-selection constraint) strengthens the case for  subsidizing charity. We also consider a case where the government is unable  to target the charitable giving through a direct tax instrument, and examine  how the optimal marginal income tax structure is adjusted in response to  charitable giving.

    Keywords: Conspicuous consumption; conspicuous charitable giving; optimal

     income taxation; warm glow; stigma

    JEL: D03 D62 H21 H23

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:grz:wpaper:2016-01&r=soc

 7. Do reciprocators exploit or resist moral wiggle room? An experimental analysis

    Tobias Regner (School of Economics and Business Administration,

     Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena)

    Astrid Matthey (Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena)  By now there is substantial experimental evidence that people make use of  'moral wiggle room' (Dana et al., 2007), that is, they tend to exploit moral  excuses for selfish behavior. However, this evidence is limited to dictator  games. In our experiment, a trust game variant, we study whether moral wiggle  room also prevails, when reciprocity is a potential motivation for being  generous. Trustees' back transfer choices are elicited for five different  transfer levels of the trustor. Moreover, we ask trustees to provide their  back transfer schedule for different scenarios that vary the implementation  probability of the back transfer. This design allows us to identify subjects  who reciprocate and analyze how these reciprocators respond to the provision  of moral wiggle room. Our results suggest that moral wiggle room exists as  well in the context of reciprocity. Among our subjects, 40% of the  reciprocators exploited moral wiggle room.

    Keywords: social preferences, pro-social behavior, experiments,

     reciprocity, moral wiggle room, self-image concerns

    JEL: C72 C91 D03 D80

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2015-027&r=soc

 8. Psychology of Trust: A Three Component Analytical Framework to Explain the Impact of Formal Institutions on Social Trust Formation

    Tamilina, Larysa

    Tamilina, Natalya

 Drawing on a social-cognitive theory of psychology, this study introduces a  new conceptual framework to explain trust building by individuals and the  role that formal rules and laws may play in this process. Trust is viewed as  composed of cultural, communal, and contextual components, with the latter  encompassing formal institutions. We demonstrate that the contextual  component measured through three institutional indexes is the strongest  predictor of social trust that may not only condition the importance of  cultural and communal components for the process of trust formation, but also  trigger changes in them. We also furnish evidence that this impact may vary  across formal institutional types and suggest that the autonomy dimension of  the institutional framework is particularly important for social trust  building.

    Keywords: interpersonal trust, trust formation, formal institutions,

     social-cognitive psychology

    JEL: K40 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:68647&r=soc

 9. Digital Trust, Platforms, and Policy

    Seppälä, Timo

    Mattila, Juri

 In the Europe 2020 strategy, the European Commission has defined trust and  security as one of the seven key pillars of its digital agenda. This  decision, of course, is not a difficult one to rationalize. Without trust and  security, the prospects of benefiting from any kind of a network of systems  are extremely limited — no matter how interoperable and pervasive the network  in itself may be.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rif:briefs:42&r=soc

10. What Aspects of Society Affect the Quality of Life of a Minority? Global Evidence from the New Gay Happiness Index

    Berggren, Niclas (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN))

    Nilsson, Therese (Lund University)

    Bjørnskov, Christian (Aarhyus University)  There is great variation in views on and treatment of minorities such as gay  men across the world. We are the first to pinpoint what features of societies  that are beneficial to gay men’s quality of life by making use of a unique  new cross-country dataset covering 110 countries, the Gay Happiness Index. It  covers how gays perceive public opinion about them, how they experience  behavior towards them and how satisfied they are with their lives. Our study  is based on the premise that it is important to look at minority-specific  effects of policies and institutions and not solely at the effects for the  average citizen, as well as the transmission mechanisms through which  policies and institutions affect life satisfaction. We find that legal rights  for gay men, GDP per capita, democracy and economic globalization tend to  benefit gays, primarily by shaping public opinion and behavior in a pro-gay  direction, while religion and living in a post-communist country exert a  negative effect. These factors have largely been shown to matter for the  well-being of people in general as well, which interestingly implies that  “special rights” are not necessarily needed for gays but the same policies  that provide a good life for most people.

    Keywords: Gays; Homosexuality; Minorities; Happiness; Wellbeing; Life

     satisfaction; Institutions; Democracy; Globalization

    JEL: I31 Z13 Z18

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1101&r=soc

11. Particularism and Universalism in Russian Post-Soviet Foreign Policy: Russia’S Discourse on Humanitarian Cooperation in the CIS

    Natalia N. Morozova (National Research University Higher School of

     Economics)

 This article offers a discussion of Russia’s post-Soviet search for  international legitimacy, informed by the notions of social antagonism and  hegemony elaborated by E.Laclau and C. Mouffe. It is argued that discourse on  humanitarian cooperation in the CIS is at the heart of Russia’s current  attempts to gain international legitimacy: it addresses the demands of  identity construction antagonistically opposed to the European ‘other’ and  simultaneously inscribes Russian identity within a counter-hegemonic  normative discourse.

    Keywords: political legitimacy, identity, discourse analysis, hegemony,

     social antagonism, Russian post-Soviet foreign policy

    JEL: Z

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:24/ir/2015&r=soc

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