In this issue we feature 9 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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In this issue we have:

1. The Relationship between Social Capital and Health in China - Xindong Xue; Marshall Mo; W. Robert Reed
2. The ecology of social interactions in online and offline environments - Angelo Antoci; Alexia Delfino; Fabio Paglieri; Fabio Sabatini
3. Increasing trust in the bank to enhance savings: Experimental evidence from India - Rahul Mehrotra; Vincent Somville; Lore vandewalle
4. Urban Immigrant Diversity and Inclusive Institutions - Abigail Cooke; Thomas Kemeny
5. Information and Crime Perceptions: Evidence from a Natural Experiment - Nicola Mastrorocco; Luigi Minale
6. Social Identity, Attitudes Towards Cooperation, and Social Preferences: Evidence From Switzerland - Devesh Rustagi; Marcella Veronesi
7. Collective Action Abroad: How Foreign Investors Organize Evidence from Foreign Business Associations In the Russian Federation - Michael Rochlitz
8. Predicting Human Cooperation - John J. Nay; Yevgeniy Vorobeychik
9. Cognitive Empathy in Conflict Situations - Florian Gauer; Christoph Kuzmics

1. The Relationship between Social Capital and Health in China - Xindong Xue, Marshall Mo

   W. Robert Reed (University of Canterbury)  This paper uses the 2005 and 2006 China General Social Survey (CGSS) to study  the relationship between social capital and health in China. It is the most  comprehensive analysis of this subject to date, both in the sizes of the  samples it analyses, in the number of social capital variables it  investigates, and in its treatment of endogeneity. We identify social trust,  social relationships, and social networks as important determinants of  self-reported health. The magnitude of the estimated effects are economically  important, in some cases being of the same size or larger than the effects  associated with age and income. Our findings suggest that there is scope for  social capital to be a significant policy tool for improving health outcomes  in China.

   Keywords: Social capital, trust, self-reported health, China, ordered

    probit regression, heteroskedastic ordered probit regression, interaction

    effects, endogeneity.

   JEL: I1 I18 P25 O53

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cbt:econwp:16/02&r=soc

2. The ecology of social interactions in online and offline environments - Angelo Antoci, Alexia Delfino, Fabio Paglieri and Fabio Sabatini

 The rise in online social networking has brought about a revolution in social  relations. However, its effects on offline interactions and its implications  for collective well-being are still not clear and are under-investigated. We  study the ecology of online and offline interaction in an evolutionary game  framework where individuals can adopt different strategies of socialization.

 Our main result is that the spreading of self-protective behaviors to cope  with hostile social environments can lead the economy to non-socially optimal  stationary states.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1601.07776&r=soc

3. Increasing trust in the bank to enhance savings: Experimental evidence from India - Rahul Mehrotra, Vincent Somville and  Lore vandewalle

 Recent evidence highlights the importance of trust in explaining bank account  savings. According to economic theory, repeated interactions can play a  crucial role in shaping trust. We designed the first field experiment that  tests whether increased interactions between clients and bankers influence a  client's trust in bankers. We promoted interactions by randomly (i) opening  accounts for the unbanked and (ii) making weekly payments on their accounts.

 At the end of these interventions, we measured trust by playing trust games  between clients on the one hand, and their own local banker as well as an  anonymous other banker on the other hand. The only intervention that has a  signicant impact on the number of interactions is opening a bank account. It  also greatly increases trust in the anonymous banker, but not in their own  banker. Next, we investigate the importance of trust for account savings. We  find a strong positive correlation between the clients' trust in their own  banker and savings in the account, but their trust in another banker does not  correlate with savings. From the decomposition of trust in its different  determinants, we learn that expected trustworthiness matters most in  explaining savings, while there is a minor role for social preferences and no  role for risk attitudes. We conclude that the personalized client-banker  relationships are crucial, but not malleable. Strategies which can deal with  the expected trustworthiness - such as providing access to an ATM, or to a  denser network of local bankers - might promote bank account savings.

   Keywords: India finance trust savings banking experiment rct

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chm:wpaper:wp2016-02&r=soc

4. Urban Immigrant Diversity and Inclusive Institutions - Abigail Cooke, Thomas Kemeny

 Recent evidence suggests that rising immigrant diversity in cities offers  economic benefits, including improved innovation, entrepreneurship and  productivity. One potentially important but underexplored dimension of this  relationship is how local institutional context shapes the benefits firms and  workers receive from the diversity in their midst. Theory suggests that  institutions can make it less costly for diverse workers to transact, thereby  catalyzing the latent bene ts of heterogeneity.

This paper tests the  hypothesis that the effects of immigrant diversity on productivity will be  stronger in locations featuring more “inclusive" institutions. It leverages  comprehensive longitudinal linked employer-employee data for the U.S. and two  distinct measures of inclusive institutions at the metropolitan area level: social capital and pro- or anti-immigrant ordinances.

Findings confirm the  importance of institutional context: in cities with low levels of inclusive  institutions, the benefits of diversity are modest and in some cases  statistically insignificant; in cities with high levels of inclusive  institutions, the benefits of immigrant diversity are positive, significant,  and substantial. Moreover, natives residing in cities that have enacted laws  restricting immigrants enjoy no diversity spillovers whatsoever, while  immigrants in these cities continue to receive a diversity bonus. These  results confirm the economic significance of urban immigrant diversity, while  suggesting the importance of local social and economic institutions.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cen:wpaper:16-07&r=soc

5. Information and Crime Perceptions: Evidence from a Natural Experiment - Nicola Mastrorocco (London School of Economics); Luigi Minale (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) 

This paper investigates the influence of media on the beliefs and perceptions  individuals hold, with a focus on crime perceptions. We study the case of  Italy, where the majority of television channels have been under the  influence of the former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for more than a  decade. First, we document that these channels systematically over represent  crime news compared to others. We then test if individuals revise their  perceptions about crime when exposure to news programs broadcast by a  specific group of partisan channels is reduced. In order to identify the  causal effect we exploit a natural experiment in the Italian television  market where the staggered introduction of the digital TV signal led to a  drastic drop in the viewing shares of the channels above. Combining unique  data on each channel’s crime news coverage and prime-time viewing shares,  we find that reduced exposure to crime related news decreased concerns about  crime, an effect that is mainly driven by older individuals who, on average,  watch more television and use alternative sources of information (such as  Internet, radio and newspapers) less frequently. Finally, we show that this  change in crime perceptions is likely to have important implications for  voting behaviour.

   Keywords: information, mass media, persuasion, crime perceptions

   JEL: D72 D83 K42 L82

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:1601&r=soc

6. Social Identity, Attitudes Towards Cooperation, and Social Preferences: Evidence From Switzerland - Devesh Rustagi (Goethe University Frankfurt)

   Marcella Veronesi (Department of Economics (University of Verona))  We investigate the role of social identity in explaining individual variation  in social preferences in the domain of cooperation. We combine measures of  social identity at both extensive and intensive margins with measures of  social preferences elicited using a public goods game in the strategy method  among a representative sample of Swiss households. We document a strong  association between social identity and social preferences, which becomes  stronger with the degree of social identity. Using different data sources, we  show that social identity matters also for attitudes towards cooperation. Our  results are not driven by differences in national or even local institutions,  geography, historical, and economic conditions. Additional analyses show that  grandparental and parental background shapes social identity, as well as  social preferences. Our design allows us to go beyond behavior and  disentangle social preferences from beliefs, highlighting the importance of  social identity for deeper social preferences in a natural field setting.

   Keywords: Social identity, social preferences, conditional cooperation,

    attitudes towards cooperation, public goods game

   JEL: C93 D03 D70 H41 Z13

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

7. Collective Action Abroad: How Foreign Investors Organize Evidence from Foreign Business Associations In the Russian Federation - Michael Rochlitz (National Research University Higher School of Economics) 

What role can collective action by foreign investors play in an environment  characterized by incomplete institutions? We study this question by looking  on foreign business associations in the Russian Federation. By interviewing

 17 foreign business associations and conducting an online survey of their  member firms, we find that business associations play an important  welfare-enhancing role in providing a series of support and informational  services. However, they do not play a significant role in lobbying the  collective interests of their member firms, especially in the current  political context in Russia where since the start of the Ukraine crisis the  business community seems to have suffered a general loss of influence on  political decision making

   Keywords: collective action; business associations; lobbying

   JEL: D71 D72

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:32/ps/2016&r=soc

8. Predicting Human Cooperation - John J. Nay;Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

 The Prisoner's Dilemma has been a subject of extensive research due to its  importance in understanding the ever-present tension between individual  self-interest and social benefit. A strictly dominant strategy in a  Prisoner's Dilemma (defection), when played by both players, is mutually  harmful. Repetition of the Prisoner's Dilemma can give rise to cooperation as  an equilibrium, but defection is as well, and this ambiguity is difficult to  resolve. The numerous behavioral experiments investigating the Prisoner's  Dilemma highlight that players often cooperate, but the level of cooperation  varies significantly with the specifics of the experimental predicament. We  present the first computational model of human behavior in repeated  Prisoner's Dilemma games that unifies the diversity of experimental  observations in a systematic and quantitatively reliable manner. Our model  relies on data we integrated from many experiments, comprising 168,386  individual decisions. The computational model is composed of two pieces: the  first predicts the first-period action using solely the structural game  parameters, while the second predicts dynamic actions using both game  parameters and history of play. Our model is extremely successful not merely  at fitting the data, but in predicting behavior at multiple scales in  experimental designs not used for calibration, using only information about  the game structure. We demonstrate the power of our approach through a  simulation analysis revealing how to best promote human cooperation.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1601.07792&r=soc

9. Cognitive Empathy in Conflict Situations - Florian Gauer (Bielefeld University)

   Christoph Kuzmics (University of Graz)  Two individuals are involved in a conflict situation in which preferences are  ex ante uncertain. While they eventually learn their own preferences, they  have to pay a small cost if they want to learn their opponent’s preferences.

 We show that, for sufficiently small positive costs of information  acquisition, in any Bayesian Nash equilibrium of the resulting game of  incomplete information the probability of getting informed about the  opponent’s preferences is bounded away from zero and one.

   Keywords: Incomplete Information; Information Acquisition; Theory of Mind;

    Conflict; Imperfect Empathy

   JEL: C72 C73 D03 D74 D82 D83

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:grz:wpaper:2016-02&r=soc

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