In this issue we feature 12 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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In this issue we have:

1. A Simple Model of Homophily in Social Networks - Sergio Currarini; Jesse Matheson; Fernando Vega Redondo
2. Social Norms and Information Diffusion in Water-saving Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment in Colombia - Jaime Torres, Mónica Marcela; Carlsson, Fredrik
3. Exposure to Refugees and Voting for the Far-Right. (Unexpected) Results from Austria - Andreas Steinmayr
4.  Disaster and political trust: The Japan Tsunami and Earthquake of 2011 - Uslaner, Eric; yamamura, Eiji
5. Social capital, entrepreneurship and living standards: differences between immigrants and the native born - Matthew Roskruge; Jacques Poot; Laura King
6. Money, Social Capital and Materialism. Evidence from Happiness Data - Piekalkiewicz, Marcin
7. Burying the Bumblebee Once and for All - Bergh, Andreas; Bjørnskov, Christian
8. The Unintended Long-term Consequences of Mao’s Mass Send-Down Movement: Marriage, Social Network, and Happiness - Shun Wang; Weina Zhou
9. The Formation of Prosociality: Causal Evidence on the Role of Social Environment - Kosse, Fabian; Deckers, Thomas; Schildberg-Hörisch, Hannah; Falk, Armin
10. In Gov We Trust, Voluntary compliance in networked investment games - Natalia BORZINO; Enrique FATAS; Emmanuel PETERLE
11. Morals and markets: The case of ultimatum bargaining - Sandro Casal; Francesco Fallucchi; Simone Quercia
12. Trusting Former Rebels: An Experimental Approach to Understanding Reintegration After Civil War - Bauer, Michal; Fiala, Nathan; Levely, Ian

 1. A Simple Model of Homophily in Social Networks

    Sergio Currarini

    Jesse Matheson

    Fernando Vega Redondo

 Biases in meeting opportunities have been recently shown to play a key role  for the emergence of homophily in social networks (see Currarini, Jackson and  Pin 2009). The aim of this paper is to provide a simple microfoundation of  these biases in a model where the size and typecomposition of the meeting  pools are shaped by agents' socialization decisions. In particular, agents  either inbreed (direct search only to similar types) or outbreed (direct  search to population at large). When outbreeding is costly, this is shown to  induce stark equilibrium behavior of a threshold type: agents \inbreed" (i.e.

 mostly meet their own type) if, and only if, their group is above certain  size. We show that this threshold equilibrium generates patterns of in-group  and cross-group ties that are consistent with empirical evidence of homophily  in two paradigmatic instances: high school friendships and interethnic  marriages.

    Keywords: Homophily, social networks, segregation.

    JEL: D7 D71 D85 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lec:leecon:16/05&r=soc

 2. Social Norms and Information Diffusion in Water-saving Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment in Colombia

    Jaime Torres, Mónica Marcela (Department of Economics, School of Business,

     Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

    Carlsson, Fredrik (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics

     and Law, Göteborg University)

 This paper investigates direct and spillover effects of a social information  campaign aimed at encouraging residential water savings in Colombia. The  campaign was organized as a randomized field experiment, consisting of  monthly delivery of consumption reports, including normative messages, for  one year. Results indicate that social information and appeals to normbased  behavior reduce water use by up to 6.8% in households directly targeted by  the campaign. In addition, we find evidence of spillover effects: households  that were not targeted by the campaign reduced water use by 5.8% in the first  six months following the intervention. Nevertheless, neither direct nor  spillover effects can be attributed to social networks for any of our chosen  proxies of social and geographic proximity.

    Keywords: Peer effects; social norms; randomized evaluation; water utilities

    JEL: C93 D03 L95 O12

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0652&r=soc

 3. Exposure to Refugees and Voting for the Far-Right. (Unexpected) Results

     from Austria

    Andreas Steinmayr

 An important concern about the surge in the number of refugees arriving in  Europe is increased support for far-right, nationalist, anti-immigration  parties. This paper studies a natural experiment in an Austrian federal state  to identify the causal effect of exposure to refugees in the neighborhood on  the support for the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). In the Upper  Austria state election in September 2015 the FPÖ doubled its vote share with  a fierce anti-asylum campaign. Since only 42 percent of Upper Austrian  communities hosted refugees at the time of the election, direct exposure to  refugees varied at the local level. To account for the potential endogeneity  in the distribution of refugees, I use pre-existing group accommodations as  instrumental variable. To cope with the sudden inflow of large numbers of  refugees, these buildings were used for refugee accommodation and thus  strongly increase the probability of refugee presence in the community. In  line with the contact hypothesis I find that hosting refugees in the  community dampens the positive overall trend and decreases FPÖ support by

 4.42 percentage points in state elections. Further analysis using exit poll  data reveals a positive effect on the optimism in the population that the  integration of refugees can be managed. Placebo tests show that there were no  effects in elections prior to 2015.

    Keywords: Immigration, refugees, political economy, voting

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wfo:wpaper:y:2016:i:514&r=soc

 4. Disaster and political trust: The Japan Tsunami and Earthquake of 2011.

    Uslaner, Eric

    yamamura, Eiji

 We show how disasters influence subjective political trust by testing the  effect of the 2011 Great East Japan. For this test, we used the individual  level data of 7 Asian covering the period before and after the disaster. The  key findings are: the disaster lead to sharp drops in trust of the national  government, trust in the Prime Minister, trust in political parties, and  trust in the parliament. However, we do not find a loss of support in local  governments.

    Keywords: Political trust; Natural disaster; Nuclear accident

    JEL: H84 J28 Q54

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:70527&r=soc

 5. Social capital, entrepreneurship and living standards: differences between immigrants and the native born

    Matthew Roskruge (University of Waikato)

    Jacques Poot (University of Waikato)

    Laura King (University of Waikato)

 Both migrant entrepreneurship and social capital are topics which have  attracted a great deal of attention. However, relatively little econometric  analysis has been done on their interrelationship. In this paper we first  consider the relationship between social capital and the prevalence of  entrepreneurship. We also investigate the relationship between social capital  and the living standards of entrepreneurs. In both cases we ask whether these  interrelationships differ between migrants and comparable native-born people.

 We utilize unit record data from the pooled 2008, 2010 and 2012 New Zealand  General Social Surveys (NZGSS). The combined sample consists of 15,541  individuals who are in the labour force. Entrepreneurs are defined as those  in the sample who obtained income from self-employment or from owning a  business. Social capital is proxied by responses to questions on social  networks, volunteering and sense of community. The economic standard of  living is measured by either personal income or by an Economic Living  Standards Index (ELSI) score developed by the New Zealand Ministry of Social  Development. We find significant differences between migrants and the native  born in terms of the attributes of social capital that are correlated with  entrepreneurship, but volunteering matters equally for both groups. The  positive association between social capital attributes and ELSI scores is  similar between migrant and natives. Social capital contributes little to  explaining incomes of either group.

    Keywords: migration, social capital, entrepreneurship, income, standard of living

    JEL: F22 J15 L26 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:1607&r=soc

 6. Money, Social Capital and Materialism. Evidence from Happiness Data

    Piekalkiewicz, Marcin

 Are unhappiness, high concern for money and scarcity of social capital  different faces of the same phenomenon? Economists tend to treat these  variables as distinct correlates of well-being. On the contrary, positive  psychologists argue that they all relate to materialism, a system of personal  values ascribing great importance in life to extrinsic motivations and low  priority to intrinsic motivations. Using data from two European  cross-sectional surveys and the German Socio-Economic Panel, I test the  hypothesis that material interests, proxied by the effects of individual and  reference income on well-being, are associated with low levels of social  capital. The results suggest that people with scarce social capital tend to  have greater material interests, whereas the negative effect of income  comparisons on well-being is eliminated for individuals exhibiting the  highest levels of social capital. The implication of such finding is that  promoting social capital reduces people's material concerns and has positive  impact on their well-being. The results from a country-level analysis  additionally show that, since social capital moderates the importance of  income for well-being on individual level, the well-being gap between income  groups is significantly smaller in countries with higher social capital.

    Keywords: subjective well-being,life satisfaction,social capital,materialism,relative income,social comparisons,happiness inequality

    JEL: D31 I31 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:esprep:130185&r=soc

 7. Burying the Bumblebee Once and for All:

    Bergh, Andreas (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN))

    Bjørnskov, Christian (Aarhus University)  High levels of social trust has been linked to both public sector size and  long term economic growth, thereby helping to explain how some countries are  able to combine high taxes and relatively high levels of economic growth.

 This paper examines if social trust as a background factor also insulates  countries against negative effects of public sector size on growth, as  government size and growth are found to be negatively associated in several  recent studies. We note that the effect is theoretically ambiguous. In panel  data from 66 countries across 40 years, we find little robust evidence of  insulating effects. Instead we find robust evidence that high trust  aggravates the crowding out effects of public sector size on private  investments.

    Keywords: Tust; Economic growth; Government consumption

    JEL: H10 O11 P16 Z10

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1119&r=soc

 8. The Unintended Long-term Consequences of Mao’s Mass Send-Down Movement: Marriage, Social Network, and Happiness

    Shun Wang (Korea Development Institute (KDI) School of Public Policy and

     Management, 263 Nansojeong-ro, Sejong, Korea)

    Weina Zhou (Department of Economics, Dalhousie University, 6214 University

     Avenue, Halifax, NS, Canada)

 This paper uses the China General Social Survey (CGSS) 2003 to evaluate the  long-term consequences of a forced migration, the state’s “send-down”

 movement (shang shan xia xiang, or up to the mountains, down to the villages)  during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, on individuals’ nonmaterial  well-being. The send-down program resettled over 16 million urban youths to  the countryside to carry out hard manual labor over the years 1968-1978. Most  of them were allowed to return to urban areas when the Cultural Revolution  ended. We find that those who had the send-down experience have worse  marriage outcome, lower-quality social network, and lower level of happiness  than their non-send-down counterparts. The negative effects of the forced  migration are robust against a detailed set of family backgrounds and  personal characteristics.

    Keywords: Send-down movement, Forced migration, Marriage, Social network, Happiness

    JEL: I31 J12 J18 J61

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hic:wpaper:213&r=soc

 9. The Formation of Prosociality: Causal Evidence on the Role of Social Environment

    Kosse, Fabian (University of Bonn)

    Deckers, Thomas (University of Bonn)

    Schildberg-Hörisch, Hannah (University of Bonn)

    Falk, Armin (University of Bonn)

 This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social  environment for the formation of prosociality. In a first step, we show that  socio-economic status (SES) as well as the intensity of mother-child  interaction and mothers’ prosocial attitudes are systematically related to  elementary school children’s prosociality. In a second step, we present  evidence on a randomly assigned variation of the social environment,  providing children with a mentor for the duration of one year. Our data  include a two-year follow-up and reveal a significant and persistent increase  in prosociality in the treatment relative to the control group. Moreover,  enriching the social environment bears the potential to close the observed  developmental gap in prosociality between low and high SES children. Our  findings suggest that the program serves as a substitute for prosocial  stimuli in the family environment.

    Keywords: social preferences, prosociality, formation of preferences, trust, social inequality

    JEL: D64 C90

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9861&r=soc

10. In Gov We Trust, Voluntary compliance in networked investment games

    Natalia BORZINO (University of East Anglia)

    Enrique FATAS (University of East Anglia)

    Emmanuel PETERLE (CRESE EA3190 Univ. Bourgogne Franche-Comté)  We conduct a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate trust and  trustworthiness in a networked investment game in which two senders interact  with a receiver. We investigate to what extent senders and receivers comply  with an exogenous and non-binding recommendation. We also manipulate the  level of information available to senders regarding receiver’s behavior in  the network. We compare a baseline treatment in which senders are only  informed about the actions and outcomes of their own investment games to two  information treatments. In the reputation treatment, senders receive ex ante  information regarding the average amount returned by the receiver in the  previous period. In the transparency treatment, each sender receives ex post  additional information regarding the returning decision of the receiver to  the other sender in the network. Across all treatments and for both senders  and receivers, the non-binding rule has a significant and positive impact on  individual decisions. Providing senders with additional information regarding  receiver’s behavior affects trust at the individual level, but leads to mixed  results at the aggregate level. Our findings suggest that reputation  building, as well as allowing for social comparison could be efficient ways  for receivers to improve trust within networks.

    Keywords: Experimental economics, Taxation, Trust, Information, Investment game.

    JEL: C72 C91 D03 H26

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crb:wpaper:2016-04&r=soc

11. Morals and markets: The case of ultimatum bargaining

    Sandro Casal (University of Milan)

    Francesco Fallucchi (University of East Anglia)

    Simone Quercia (University of Bonn)

 We conduct an experiment to investigate the acceptable boundaries of immoral  behavior in barganing situations. We find that subjects are willing to punish  at their own cost only an extremely immoral action of their counterpart that  affects a third party. However, the possibility to nullify the negative  effects of the immoral action and to restore the ex-ante situation for the  third party increases the willingness to punish.

    Keywords: mini ultimatum game, morals

    JEL: C72 C91 D6

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uea:wcbess:16-05&r=soc

12. Trusting Former Rebels: An Experimental Approach to Understanding Reintegration After Civil War

    Bauer, Michal (CERGE-EI)

    Fiala, Nathan (University of Connecticut)

    Levely, Ian (Charles University in Prague)  We use a set of experiments to study the effects of forced military service  for a rebel group on social capital. We examine the case of Northern Uganda,  where recruits did not selfselect nor were systematically screened by rebels.

 We find that individual cooperativeness robustly increases with length of  soldiering, especially among those who soldiered during early age. Parents of  ex-soldiers are aware of the behavioral difference: they trust exsoldiers  more and expect them to be more trustworthy. These results suggest that the  impact of child soldiering on social capital, in contrast to human capital,  is not necessarily detrimental.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zwi:wpaper:31&r=soc

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