In this issue we feature 12 current papers on the theme of social capital, chosen by Fabio Sabatini (Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”):

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1. The Sacred and the Profane of Budget Cycles: Evidence from Italian    Municipalities.  Revelli, Federico; Zotti, Roberto
2. Altruism and Risk Sharing in Networks  Bourles, Renaud; Bramoulle, Yann; Perez-Richet, Eduardo 
3. Fake News and Advertising on Social Media: A Study of the    Anti-Vaccination Movement  Lesley Chiou; Catherine Tucker
4. Caste, Technology and Social Networks  Gupta, I.; Veettil, P.C.; Speelman, S.
5. Age, Social Capital, and Herders Grassland Renting Decisions in Inner    Mongolia, P.R. China  Tan, S.; Liu, B.; Hannaway, D.
6. The Dynamics of Discrimination: Theory and Evidence  Aislinn Bohren; Alex Imas; Michael Rosenberg 
7. Skill of the Immigrants and Vote of the Natives: Immigration and    Nationalism in European Elections 2007-2016  Simone Moriconi; Giovanni Peri; Riccardo Turati 
8. Inferring the Ideological Affliations of Political Committees via    Financial Contributions Networks  Yiran Chen; Hanming Fang
9. The Role of Institutions and Immigrant Networks in Firms' Offshoring    Decisions  Moriconi, Simone; Peri, Giovanni; Pozzoli, Dario
10. The Vertical Cooperative An experiment on cooperation and punishment    across networks  Fatas, E; Miguel A. Mel?ndez-Jim?nez; Hector Solaz
11. Social networks, mobility, and political participation: The potential    for women???s self-help groups to improve access and use of public    entitlement schemes in India  Kumar, Neha; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Arrieta, Alejandra; Jilani, Amir Hamza;   Chakrabarti, Suman; Menon, Purnima; Quisumbing, Agnes R.
12. Supervisory trust to be earned ? the role of Ethical leadership    mediated by Person-organisational fit  Anton Grobler  

1. The Sacred and the Profane of Budget Cycles: Evidence from Italian
     Municipalities.
   Revelli, Federico; Zotti, Roberto (University of Turin)
  This paper investigates the influence of the staggered schedule of Italian
  mayoral elections and of the calendar of traditional religious celebrations
  (Patron Saint days) on the timing of local tax setting decisions and on the
  selection process of mayoral candidates. As for the impact of the electoral
  schedule on fiscal policy-making, we find evidence of a political budget
  cycle on yearly panel data from over 8,000 municipal authorities, with
  budgets deteriorating as elections approach and improving thereafter. When
  analyzing the specific timing of annual local tax rate decisions within
  election years, and using localities not holding elections in those same
  years as controls, we find that incumbents are more likely to schedule the
  crucial decisions about the local income tax rate during the months
  following the date of the elections. As for the effect of Patron Saint day
  celebrations, we find that fiscal decisions are less likely to be scheduled
  around those dates, compatibly with the hypothesis that those events
  constitute temporary shocks to the social capital of local communities,
  inducing incumbent governments to abstain from making potentially disruptive
  fiscal decisions under those sensitive circumstances. Finally, we find that
  when local elections happen to take place in the proximity of a locality?s
  traditional celebrations, the elected mayors tend to exhibit milder ideology
  and higher indicators of valence, reinforcing the hypothesis that local
  folklore contributes to common value thinking, social capital building, and
  sense of community.
   Date: 2018?10
 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uto:dipeco:201816&r=soc

 2. Altruism and Risk Sharing in Networks
   Bourles, Renaud; Bramoulle, Yann; Perez-Richet, Eduardo
  We provide the first analysis of the risk-sharing implications of altruism
  networks. Agents are embedded in a fixed network and care about each other.
  We study whether altruistic transfers help smooth consumption and how this
  depends on the shape of the network. We identify two benchmarks where
  altruism networks generate efficient insurance: for any shock when the
  network of perfect altruism is strongly connected and for any small shock
  when the network of transfers is weakly connected. We show that the extent
  of informal insurance depends on the average path length of the altruism
  network and that small shocks are partially insured by endogenous
  risk-sharing communities. We uncover complex structural effects. Under iid
  incomes, central agents tend to be better insured, the consumption
  correlation between two agents is positive and tends to decrease with
  network distance, and a new link can decrease or increase the consumption
  variance of indirect neighbors. Overall, we show that altruism in networks
  has a first-order impact on risk and generates specific patterns of
  consumption smoothing.
   Keywords: altruism; Informal Insurance; networks; Risk Sharing
   Date: 2018?09
 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13164&r=soc

 3. Fake News and Advertising on Social Media: A Study of the
     Anti-Vaccination Movement
   Lesley Chiou; Catherine Tucker
  Online sources sometimes publish information that is false or intentionally
  misleading. We study the role of social networks and advertising on social
  networks in the dissemination of false news stories about childhood
  vaccines. We document that anti-vaccine Facebook groups disseminate false
  stories beyond the groups as well as serving as an ?echo? chamber. We also
  find that after Facebook's ban on advertising by fake new sites, the sharing
  of fake news articles on Facebook fell by 75% on Facebook compared to
  Twitter.
   JEL: L86
   Date: 2018?11
 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25223&r=soc

 4. Caste, Technology and Social Networks
   Gupta, I.; Veettil, P.C.; Speelman, S.
  This paper analyzes the role of informal social networks in technology
  diffusion in a caste-based society in which a social hierarchical structure
  is prevalent. Often, information and technology diffusion are constrained by
  social and economic boundaries. In a complex and hierarchical social system
  in which caste plays a very decisive role in everyday life as well as in the
  political and policy fabric of the regional, state, and national system,
  proper targeting and dissemination of technology to the marginalized
  sections of society are very important for their development. Taking
  diffusion of improved rice varieties as an example, we analyze whether
  technology diffusion is confined within caste-based social networks or
  whether technology can break caste boundaries and spread across social
  networks. We found that informal networks tend to concentrate within
  caste-based groups and hence observed significantly stronger social network
  within caste than across caste categories. Strong within caste network
  discourages hybrids but facilitates stabilized technologies such as improved
  varieties whereas strong across caste networks discourage adoption of older
  and traditional varieties. It is important to highlight that existence of
  stronger within as well as across caste networks for scheduled tribes (ST)
  facilitated these marginalized communities to adopt improved and hybrid
  varieties. Acknowledgement :
   Keywords: Labor and Human Capital
   Date: 2018?07
 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:iaae18:277048&r=soc

 5. Age, Social Capital, and Herders Grassland Renting Decisions in Inner
     Mongolia, P.R. China
   Tan, S.; Liu, B.; Hannaway, D.
  The land rental market is critical for herders to obtain access to land
  resources. However, in contrast to the numerous studies on the farmland
  rental market, few studies have focused on the grassland rental market, and
  analyses of younger herders land renting behaviors from the perspective of
  social capital are even more rare. This paper addresses three questions:
  First, what is the current situation regarding younger herders
  participation? Second, does social capital influence herders renting
  decisions? Third, is there a difference of herder age on the influence of
  social capital on grassland renting decisions? Probit model was conducted
  with data collected from 422 herder households in Inner Mongolia, P.R.
  China. Findings suggested that 1) Younger herders grassland rental behaviors
  presented the coexistence of high participation rate and high rental price .
  2) An inverse U-shape relationship existed between age and herders land
  rental decisions; 3) Compared with older herders, social capital played a
  relatively weak role in promoting the ability of younger herders to rent
  grassland. Acknowledgement : The authors thank the Foundation of Renmin
  University of China (16XNI004) for its support and thank colleagues and
  students from Renmin University of China and Inner Mongolia University for
  their participation in the field surveys.
   Keywords: Land Economics/Use
   Date: 2018?07
 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:iaae18:277034&r=soc

 6. The Dynamics of Discrimination: Theory and Evidence
   Aislinn Bohren (Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania); Alex
    Imas (Department of Economics, Carnegie Melon University); Michael
    Rosenberg (Wayfair, Inc.)
  We model the dynamics of discrimination and show how its evolution can
  identify the underlying cause. We test these theoretical predictions in a
  field experiment on a large online platform where users post content that is
  evaluated by other users on the platform. We assign posts to accounts that
  exogenously vary by gender and history of evaluations. With no prior
  evaluations, women face significant discrimination, while following a
  sequence of positive evaluations, the direction of discrimination reverses:
  posts by women are favored over those by men. According to our theoretical
  predictions, this dynamic reversal implies discrimination driven by biased
  beliefs.
   JEL: J16 D83 D9
   Keywords: Discrimination, Dynamic Behavior, Field Experiment
   Date: 2017?11?18
 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pen:papers:17-021&r=soc

 7. Skill of the Immigrants and Vote of the Natives: Immigration and
     Nationalism in European Elections 2007-2016
   Simone Moriconi (I?SEG School of Management and LEM); Giovanni Peri
    (University of California, Davis); Riccardo Turati (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE
    DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES))
  In this paper we document the impact of immigration at the regional level on
  Europeans? political preferences as expressed by voting behavior in
  parliamentary or presidential elections between 2007 and 2016. We combine
  individual data on party voting with a classification of each party?s
  political agenda on a scale of their "nationalistic" attitudes over 28
  elections across 126 parties in 12 countries. To reduce immigrant selection
  and omitted variable bias, we use immigrant settlements in 2005 and the
  skill composition of recent immigrant flows as instruments. OLS and IV
  estimates show that larger inflows of highly educated immigrants were
  associated with a change in the vote of citizens away from nationalism.
  However the inflow of less educated immigrants was positively associated
  with a vote shift towards nationalist positions. These effects were stronger
  for non-tertiary educated voters and in response to non-European immigrants.
  We also show that they are consistent with the impact of immigration on
  individual political preferences, which we estimate using longitudinal data,
  and on opinions about immigrants. Conversely, immigration did not affect
  electoral turnout. Simulations based on the estimated coefficients show that
  immigration policies balancing the number of high-skilled and low-skilled
  immigrants from outside the EU would be associated with a shift in votes
  away from nationalist parties in almost all European regions.
   JEL: D72 I28 J61
   Keywords: Immigration, Nationalism, Elections, Europe
   Date: 2018?09
 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctl:louvir:2018013&r=soc

 8. Inferring the Ideological Affliations of Political Committees via
     Financial Contributions Networks
   Yiran Chen (Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania); Hanming
    Fang (Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania)
  About two thirds of the political committees registered with the Federal
  Election Commission do not self identify their party affiliations. In this
  paper we propose and implement a novel Bayesian approach to infer about the
  ideological affiliations of political committees based on the network of the
  financial contributions among them. In Monte Carlo simulations, we
  demonstrate that our estimation algorithm achieves very high accuracy in
  recovering their latent ideological affiliations when the pairwise
  difference in ideology groups' connection patterns satisfy a condition known
  as the Chernoff-Hellinger divergence criterion. We illustrate our approach
  using the campaign finance record in 2003-2004 election cycle. Using the
  posterior mode to categorize the ideological affiliations of the political
  committees, our estimates match the self reported ideology for 94.36% of
  those committees who self reported to be Democratic and 89.49% of those
  committees who self reported to be Republican.
   JEL: D85 D72 P16
   Keywords: Ideology; Network Analysis; Stochastic Block Models
   Date: 2017?12?10
 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pen:papers:17-022&r=soc

 9. The Role of Institutions and Immigrant Networks in Firms' Offshoring
     Decisions
   Moriconi, Simone (Universit? Cattolica del Sacro Cuore); Peri, Giovanni
    (University of California, Davis); Pozzoli, Dario (Copenhagen Business
    School)
  The offshoring of production by multinational firms has expanded
  dramatically in recent decades, increasing these firms' potential for
  economic growth and technological transfers across countries. What
  determines the location of offshore production? How do countries' policies
  and characteristics affect the firm's decision about where to offshore? Do
  firms choose specific countries because of their policies or because they
  know them better? In this paper, we use a very rich dataset on Danish firms
  to analyze how decisions to offshore production depend on the institutional
  characteristics of the country and firm-specific bilateral connections. We
  find that institutions that enhance investor protection and reduce
  corruption increase the probability that firms offshore there, while those
  that increase regulation in the labor market decrease such probability. We
  also show that a firm's probability of offshoring increases with the share
  of its employees who are immigrants from that country of origin.
   JEL: F16 J38 J24
   Keywords: offshoring, product market, labor regulations, networks, fixed
    start-up costs
   Date: 2018?10
 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11888&r=soc

10. The Vertical Cooperative An experiment on cooperation and punishment
     across networks
   Fatas, E; Miguel A. Mel?ndez-Jim?nez; Hector Solaz
  We experimentally study punishment patterns across network structures, and
  their effect on cooperation. In a repeated public goods setting, subjects
  can only observe and punish their neighbors. Centralized structures (like
  the star network) outperform other incomplete networks and reach
  contribution levels like the ones observed in a complete network. Our
  results suggest that hierarchical network structures with a commonly
  observed player benefit more from sanctions not because central players
  punish more, but because they follow, and promote, different punishment
  patterns. While quasi-central players in other incomplete architectures
  (like the line network) retaliate, and get trapped in the vicious circle of
  antisocial punishment, central players in the star network do not punish
  back, increase their contributions when sanctioned by peripheral players,
  and sanction other participants in a prosocial manner. Our results
  illustrate recent field studies on the evolutionary prevalence of
  hierarchical networks. We document a network-based rationale for this
  positive effect in an identity-free, fully anonymous environment.
   Keywords: Public good experiments, networks, monitoring, punishment
   Date: 2018?11?14
 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000092:016946&r=soc

11. Social networks, mobility, and political participation: The potential
     for women???s self-help groups to improve access and use of public
     entitlement schemes in India
   Kumar, Neha; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Arrieta, Alejandra; Jilani, Amir Hamza;
    Chakrabarti, Suman; Menon, Purnima; Quisumbing, Agnes R.
  Women???s self-help groups (SHGs) have increasingly been used as a vehicle
  for social, political, and economic empowerment as well as a platform for
  service delivery. Although a growing body of literature shows evidence of
  positive impacts of SHGs on various measures of empowerment, our
  understanding of ways in which SHGs improve awareness and use of public
  services is limited. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper first examines
  how SHG membership is associated with political participation, awareness,
  and use of government entitlement schemes. It further examines the effect of
  SHG membership on various measures of social networks and mobility. Using
  data collected in 2015 across five Indian states and matching methods to
  correct for endogeneity of SHG membership, we find that SHG members are more
  politically engaged. We also find that SHG members are not only more likely
  to know of certain public entitlements than non-members, they are
  significantly more likely to avail of a greater number of public entitlement
  schemes. Additionally, SHG members have wider social networks and greater
  mobility as compared to non-members. Our results suggest that SHGs have the
  potential to increase their members??? ability to hold public entities
  accountable and demand what is rightfully theirs. An important insight,
  however, is that the SHGs themselves cannot be expected to increase
  knowledge of public entitlement schemes in absence of a deliberate effort to
  do so by an external agency.
   Keywords: INDIA; SOUTH ASIA; ASIA; self-help groups; women; public
    services; empowerment; citizen participation; social capital; government
    entitlement; social networks; political participation
   Date: 2018
 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1751&r=soc

12. Supervisory trust to be earned ? the role of Ethical leadership
     mediated by Person-organisational fit
   Anton Grobler (University of South Africa)
  Background: The trust relationship between employees and their supervisors
  (called Supervisory trust) has a definite impact on employee behaviour and
  attitudes. Furthermore, various studies found that Ethical leadership
  impacts on Supervisory trust, but in different contexts, and often with
  homogeneous or limited samples. The interactionist construct of
  Person-organisational fit (P-O fit), consisting of a combination of
  Supplementary fit (indirect fit or value congruence) and Complementary fit
  (direct or person-job fit, as well as needs-supply fit) may, however, impact
  on the relationship between ethical leadership and supervisory trust. The
  unique permutations of these relationships are important not only for
  conceptualisation purposes, but also for intervention design to enhance the
  employees? trust in their supervisors; this would contribute to positive
  employee behaviour and attitudes.Aim: The purpose of this study was to
  determine whether a relationship exists between Ethical leadership and
  Supervisory trust, with possible mediation by P-O fit.Setting: The research
  was conducted with ?60 employees from each of 17 private sector and four
  public sector organisations in South Africa.Method: This study utilised a
  positivist methodology based on an empirical approach, while using a
  cross-sectional design and quantitative analysis. The sample is relatively
  representative (in terms of race, gender and the South African work force),
  as it consisted of 60 employees from each of the 21 South African
  organisations that participated in the study, with 1 260 respondents in
  total.Results: Significant, positive relationships were found between
  Ethical leadership, P-O fit and Supervisory trust. Additionally, it was
  found that P-O fit partially mediates the relationship between Ethical
  leadership and Supervisory trust, confirming the proposed model.Conclusion:
  A strong, positive relationship exists between Ethical leadership
  (consisting of Morality and fairness, Role clarification leadership and
  Power sharing leadership) and Supervisory trust, which is partially mediated
  by P-O fit (consisting of Supplementary fit and Complementary fit).
   JEL: D23
   Keywords: Ethical leadership; Person-organisational (P-O) fit, Supervisory
    trust
   Date: 2018?11
 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sek:iacpro:8109609&r=soc

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