In this issue we feature 10 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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In this issue we have:

1. The economic value of local social networks - Frank Ethridge; Maryann Feldman; Tom Kemeny; Ted Zoller
2. Left Behind but Doing Good? Civic Engagement in Two Post-Socialist Countries - Nikolova, Milena; Roman, Monica; Zimmermann, Klaus F.
3. Privacy, Trust and Social Network Formation Alexia Gaudeul; Caterina Giannetti
4. The Roots of Regional Trust - Christoph Hauser; Gottfried Tappeiner; Janette Walde
5. Effects of Employee Social Capital on Wage Satisfaction, Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment - Christoph Hauser
6. BMI is not related to altruism, fairness, trust or reciprocity: Experimental evidence from the field and the lab - Brañas-Garza, Pablo; Espín, Antonio M.; Lenkei, Balint
7. Social Distortion in Weight Perception: A Decomposition of the Obesity Epidemic - Barbieri, Paolo Nicola
8. Young adults living with their parents and the influence of peers - Effrosyni Adamopoulou; Ezgi Kaya
9. The network-based economy in Vietnam - Quang Truong
10. The Tragedy of Corruption. Corruption as a social dilemma - Ye-Feng Chen; Shu-Guang Jiang; Marie Claire Villeval

1. The economic value of local social networks - Frank Ethridge; Maryann Feldman; Tom Kemeny; Ted Zoller

 The idea that local social capital yields economic benefits is fundamental to  theories of agglomeration, and central to claims about the virtues of cities.

 However, this claim has not been evaluated using methods that permit more  confident statements about causality. This paper examines what happens to  firms that become affiliated with a highly-connected local individual or  “dealmaker.” We adopt a quasi-experimental approach, combining  difference-in-differences and propensity score matching to address selection  and identification challenges. The results indicate that firms who link to  highly-connected local dealmakers are rewarded with substantial gains in  employment and sales when compared to a control group.

    Keywords: cities; economic development; social networks; social capital

    JEL: L14 O12 O18 R11

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:64505&r=soc

 2. Left Behind but Doing Good? Civic Engagement in Two Post-Socialist Countries - Nikolova, Milena; Roman, Monica; Zimmermann, Klaus F.

The fall of socialism in Central and Eastern Europe restored ordinary  citizens' rights and freedoms and ended their political and social isolation.

 While the freedom of movement was quickly embraced, civil society revival  lagged due to the eroded civic norms, declining social capital, and worsening  economic conditions. In this paper, we examine the link between the  out-migration of relatives and friends and the pro-social behavior of the  left behinds in two post-socialist countries – Bulgaria and Romania – the  EU's poorest, unhappiest, and among the most corrupt members. We show that  having close contacts abroad is consistently positively associated with civic  engagement and that the cultural transmission of norms from abroad could be  driving the results. Specifically, the strength of the civic engagement  culture of the family or friend's destination matters for the pro-social  behavior of respondents in the home countries. Our results imply that the  emigration of family and friends may have positive but previously  undocumented consequences for the individuals and communities left behind in  Bulgaria and Romania. Given civil society's role for development in  post-socialist Europe and the socio-economic and institutional challenges  that Bulgaria and Romania face compared with the rest of the EU,  understanding the channels fostering civil society and well-being are  important for national and EU policymakers.

    Keywords: international migration, left behind, civic engagement, social

     remittances, post-socialism

    JEL: I30 I31 F22 P30 Z10

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9540&r=soc

 3. Privacy, Trust and Social Network Formation - Alexia Gaudeul (Department of Economics, Georg-August-Universität      Göttingen); Caterina Giannetti (Jena Graduate School Human Behaviour in Social and Economic Change)

 We study in the laboratory the impact of private information revelation on  the selection of partners when forming individual networks. Our experiment  combines a "network game" and a "public-good game". In the network game,  individuals decide with whom to form a link with, while in the public-good  game they decide whether or not to contribute. The variations in our  treatments allow us to identify the effect of revealing one's name on the  probability of link formation. Our main result suggests that privacy  mechanisms affect partner selection and the consequent structure of the

 network: when individuals reveal their real name, their individual networks  are smaller but their profits are higher. This indicates that the privacy  costs of revealing personal information are compensated by more productive  links.

    Keywords: privacy, social networks, public goods, trust

    JEL: D12 D85

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2015-023&r=soc

 4. The Roots of Regional Trust - Christoph Hauser, Gottfried Tappeiner, Janette Walde

 Social trust is increasingly seen as an important determinant of economic  growth and social prosperity in regions and nations. Even in a comparatively  homogeneous area such as Europe, there are stark sub-national differences in  levels of generalized trust. It is thus of crucial importance to identify the  driving forces of regional trust and analyze the dynamics of its formation.

 The present paper considers these issues based on three waves of the European  Values Study. Evidence is provided to demonstrate that values of regional  trust remain substantially stable over an approx. 20-year period and are  modified only through spatially correlated random noise processes. This  finding is consistent with additional analyses identifying slow-moving  factors that are responsible for the spatial distribution of trust scores and  are buried deep in the cultural background of a society. Hence, in spite of  its economic significance, social trust does not appear to be amenable to  political intervention in the short to medium term.

    Keywords: social capital, European regions, spatial econometrics

    JEL: C21 R10 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:inn:wpaper:2015-13&r=soc

 5. Effects of Employee Social Capital on Wage Satisfaction, Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment - Christoph Hauser

 The article proposes that basic social attitudes and associational networks  of employees influence their interaction with coworkers and managers at the  workplace and thereby also shape work attitudes and behavior. Two terms are  introduced to analyze this hypothesis: Civic Social Capital (denoting  personal trust and associational activity) and Workplace Social Capital  (social interaction with colleagues and trust towards management). Based on a  survey of 1007 employees I demonstrate the impact of social trust and two  forms of institutional trust (confidence towards national and regional

 institutions) on a composite index of workplace social capital. In addition,  social and institutional trust also influence work related attitudes such as  perception of a fair wage, job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

 Once workplace social capital is controlled for in regressions on work  related attitudes, social trust becomes insignificant. Thus, workplace social  capital serves as a transmission mechanism converting social trust in  enhanced rates of both wage/job satisfaction and in particular organizational  commitment. In contrast, confidence towards regional institutions exerts a  sustained impact on work related attitudes that persists alongside the impact  of social interaction with colleagues and management.

    Keywords: Civic Social Capital, Social Trust, Institutional Trust,

     Workplace Social Capital, Job Satisfaction, Organizational Commitment

    JEL: Z1 Z13 J24 J28

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:inn:wpaper:2015-12&r=soc

 6. BMI is not related to altruism, fairness, trust or reciprocity: Experimental evidence from the field and the lab -Brañas-Garza, Pablo; Espín, Antonio M. ;Lenkei, Balint

 Over the past few decades obesity has become one of the largest public policy  concerns among the adult population in the developed world. Obesity and  overweight are hypothesized to affect individuals’ sociability through a  number of channels, including discrimination and low self-esteem. However,  whether these effects translate into differential behavioural patterns in  social interactions remains unknown. In two large-scale economic experiments,  we explore the relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and social  behaviour, using three paradigmatic economic games: the dictator, ultimatum,  and trust games. Our first experiment employs a representative sample of a  Spanish city's population (N=753), while the second employs a sample of  university students from the same city (N=618). Measures of altruism,  fairness/equality, trust and reciprocity are obtained from participants’

 experimental decisions. Using a variety of regression specifications and  control variables, our results suggest that BMI does not exert an effect on  any of these social preferences. Some implications of these findings are  discussed.

    Keywords: BMI; ultimatum game; dictator game; trust game; economic

     experiments; obesity; social preferences

    JEL: I12

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:68184&r=soc

 7. Social Distortion in Weight Perception: A Decomposition of the Obesity Epidemic - Barbieri, Paolo Nicola (Department of Economics, School of Business,

     Economics and Law, Göteborg University)  This paper examines the influence of social norms on obesity. We develop a  concept of social norm related to social distortion in weight perception  developed through shared experiences in a common social environment with a  high prevalence of obesity. The theoretical model show that when obesity is  common it less likely to be recognized as a problem by mitigating  individual's health concerns. We prove that our empirical measures of such a  social component are significant in influencing individual weight using  regional data from the Health Survey for England. We use the marked  difference in obesity rates between 2002 and 2006 to undertake a Fairlie  decomposition analysis. Our findings suggest that when we exclude social  norms our estimates explain less than 50% of the obesity gap. When we include  the social norms our estimates explain between 50% and 80% of the overall  obesity gap. By stratifying the result by gender we are able to prove that  men are more susceptible to social distortion, especially the low-skilled.

 Medium- and low-skilled women, similarly, are more susceptible to  environmental pressure than highly-skilled women, who result as being  completely unaffected by it. Men are also affected by a broader set of  environmental pressures, with respect to women. Overall, these results  suggest that an individual's concern over his or her body weight is closely  related to the actual weight of his or her reference network.

    Keywords: Obesity; non-linear decomposition; social norm

    JEL: D91 I10 I12 I18 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0639&r=soc

 8. Young adults living with their parents and the influence of peers-  Effrosyni Adamopoulou (Bank of Italy), Ezgi Kaya (Cardiff Business School)

 This paper focuses on young adults in the US living with their parents and  studies the role of peers. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of  Adolescent Health we analyse the influence of high school friends on the  nest-leaving decision of young adults. We achieve identification by  exploiting the differences in the timing of leaving the parental home among  peers, the individual-specific nature of the peer groups, and by including  school and grade fixed effects. Our results indicate that there are  statistically significant peer effects on the decision of young adults to  leave parental home. This is true even after we control for labour and  housing market conditions and for a comprehensive list of individual and  family-of-origin characteristics that are not usually observed by the  econometrician. We discuss various mechanisms and we confirm the robustness  of our results through a placebo exercise. Our findings correspond with the  increasing trend of young adults living with their parents that has been  observed in the US during the last 50 years.

    Keywords: peer effects, friends, living arrangements, leaving parental home

    JEL: D10 J12 J60 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_1038_15&r=soc

 9. The network-based economy in Vietnam - Quang Truong (Maastricht School of Management)

  After two decades of GPD high growth in the 1991-2010, Vietnam is currently  entering a declining phase. The on-going developments would virtually nullify  all achievements the country has previously achieved and deny the CPV’s  promise to transform Vietnam into an industrialized country in 2020. The  ‘ideology vs reality’ dilemma facing Vietnam today is generally held as the  main block holding back the momentum Doi moi campaign initially generated  growth, but has prevented the country jump starting and accelerating economic  growth toward a more qualitative and sustainable development phase. This is  because of the CPV continued insistence on building ‘a market economy with  socialist orientation’. The ‘socialist’ model of development, typically of a  state capitalist or network-based economy, which favors SOEs as the ‘pillars’

 of the economy with all the privileges and protection attached to it, has  drained the country’s resources and prevented the private sector from joining  the market and the development process on an equal footing. Instead, it has  created and nurtured a breeding ground for corruption, cronyism, favoritism  and nepotism that leaves little room for private innovation, efficient  production and effective management so that Vietnamese products can compete  and grow sustainably in international markets. What Vietnam really needs to  come out of the dire situation of today and to become more sustainable is a  development-oriented market economy and a public administration for  development, if the country was to keep pace with development in the region,  let alone in the world. Furthermore, a check-and-balance mechanism is needed  to allow the participation of a more active civil society to counter the  excessive abuse of power brought about by the corrupted network that has  caused severe threats the economic sustainability of the country.

    Keywords: Vietnam, development model, network-based economy, cronyism,

     corruption, civil society

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:msm:wpaper:2015/12&r=soc

10. The Tragedy of Corruption. Corruption as a social dilemma - Ye-Feng Chen (College of Economics, Zhejiang University, China); Shu-Guang Jiang (Centre for Economic Research, Shandong University, China); Marie Claire Villeval (Université de Lyon, F-69007, France; CNRS, GATE, Lyon St Etienne, 93, Chemin des Mouilles, F-69130, Ecully, France;Université Lyon 2, Lyon, F-69007, France) 

We investigate corruption as a social dilemma by means of a bribery game in  which a risk of collective failure is introduced when the number of public  officials accepting a bribe from firms reaches a certain threshold. We show  that, despite the social risk, the pursuit of individual interest prevails  and leads to the elimination of honest officials over time. Reducing the size  of the groups while increasing the probability of collective failure  diminishes the public officials’ corruptibility but is not sufficient to  eliminate the tragedy of corruption altogether.

    Keywords: Corruption, bribing, social dilemma, collective failure,

     coordination, experiment

    JEL: C92 D73 H41

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gat:wpaper:1531&r=soc

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