In this issue we feature 8 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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In this issue we have:

1. Friendship at Work: Can Peer Effects Catalyze Female Entrepreneurship? Field, Erica; Jayachandran, Seema; Pande, Rohini; Rigol, Natalia
2. The Political Legacy of American Slavery-  Acharya, Avidit; Blackwell, Matthew; Sen, Maya
3. Network Effects, Ethnic Capital and Immigrants' Earnings Assimilation: Evidence from a Spatial, Hausman-Taylor Estimation - Maani, Sholeh A.; Wang, Xingang; Rogers, Alan
4. Social Networks and Risk Management in Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty Programme - Sudhanshu Handa; Benjamin Davis; Silvio Daidone; Mike Park; Robert D. Osei; Isaac Osei-Akoto
5. Does the Concern About Local Crime Affect Trust in the Police? Joelson Oliveira Sampaio; Rodrigo De-Losso, Luciana Gross Cunha, Renan Gomes de Pieri
6. Culture, Politics, and Development - Woolcock, Michael
7. Where Do Social Preferences Come From? Chaning Jang; John Lynham
8. Conflicted Emotions Following Trust-based Interaction - Schniter, Eric; Sheremeta, Roman; Shields, Timothy

1. Friendship at Work: Can Peer Effects Catalyze Female Entrepreneurship?

   Field, Erica (Duke University)

   Jayachandran, Seema (Northwestern University)

   Pande, Rohini (Harvard University)

   Rigol, Natalia (MIT)

 Does the lack of peers contribute to the observed gender gap in  entrepreneurial success, and is the constraint stronger for women facing more  restrictive social norms? We offered two days of business counseling to a  random sample of customers of India's largest women's bank. A random  sub-sample was invited to attend with a friend. The intervention had a  significant immediate impact on participants' business activity, but only if  they were trained in the presence of a friend. Four months later, those  trained with a friend were more likely to have taken out business loans, were  less likely to be housewives, and reported increased business activity and  higher household income. The positive impacts of training with a friend were  stronger among women from religious or caste groups with social norms that  restrict female mobility.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp15-019&r=all

2. The Political Legacy of American Slavery

   Acharya, Avidit (Stanford University)

   Blackwell, Matthew (Harvard University)

   Sen, Maya (Harvard University)

 We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties  in the American South trace their origins to slavery's prevalence more than

 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high  shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose  affirmative action policies, and express racial resentment and colder  feelings toward blacks. These results cannot be explained by existing  theories, including the theory of racial threat. To explain these results, we  offer evidence for a new theory involving the historical persistence of  racial attitudes. We argue that, following the Civil War, Southern whites  faced political and economic incentives to reinforce racist norms and  institutions. This produced racially conservative political attitudes, which  in turn have been passed down locally across generations. Our results  challenge the interpretation of a vast literature on racial attitudes in the  American South.

   JEL: N32 N91 O17

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp14-057&r=all

3. Network Effects, Ethnic Capital and Immigrants' Earnings Assimilation: Evidence from a Spatial, Hausman-Taylor Estimation

   Maani, Sholeh A. (University of Auckland)

   Wang, Xingang (University of Auckland)

   Rogers, Alan (University of Auckland)  Do ethnic enclaves assist or hinder immigrants in their economic integration?

 In this paper we examine the effect of 'ethnic capital' (e.g. ethnic network  and ethnic concentration) on immigrants' earnings assimilation. We adopt a  "spatial autoregressive network approach" to construct a dynamic network  variable from micro-panel-data to capture the effects of  spatial-ethnic-specific resource networks for immigrants. The spatial lag  structure is combined with a Hausman-Taylor (1981) panel data model, which  allows for some endogeneity. We examine the effects of ethnic capital and  human capital using an eight-year Australian panel data set (HILDA). Results  show that immigrants' labor market integration is significantly affected by  the local concentration and resources of their ethnic group.

   Keywords: assimilation, ethnic capital, ethnic network, ethnic

    concentration, spatial autoregressive lag model, panel data

   JEL: J30 J31 Z13 Z18

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9308&r=all

4. Social Networks and Risk Management in Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty Programme

   Sudhanshu Handa

   Benjamin Davis

   Silvio Daidone

   Mike Park

   Robert D. Osei

   Isaac Osei-Akoto

 Understanding how household consumption, investment and saving decisions  respond to transfer income is critical to public policy. In developing  countries, saving or otherwise investing in the future is difficult for poor  households which often struggle to meet basic expenses, while high debt  burdens are also obstacles to saving. Poor households in rural areas of  developing countries typically manage risk via informal exchanges or  transfers among extended family, friends and neighbours. Motivated by the  community dynamics observed in the qualitative assessment of LEAP and the  unpredictable and lumpy payments made by the programme during the evaluation  period, the main interest of this paper is to assess within a quantitative  framework the impact of LEAP on household risk reduction strategies via  reintegration in, and strengthening of, social networks and reduction of debt  exposure.

   Keywords: cash transfers; debt management; income household; social

    development policies; social protection;

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ucf:inwopa:inwopa781&r=all

5. Does the Concern About Local Crime Affect Trust in the Police?

   Joelson Oliveira Sampaio

   Rodrigo De-Losso, Luciana Gross Cunha, Renan Gomes de Pieri  This paper investigates local crime’s concern effect on confidence in the  police using Two Least Square Regressions having as instrumental variable the  individual distance to police stations. We explore data from the Confidence  in Justice Survey conducted for the period at 2013 to 2014 at state of Sao  Paulo. We find that an increase at the total crimes registered reduces  confidence on police. Such results are more effusively in some crimes like  drug dealing and rape. Exploring heterogeneities in the results we find that  black are more sensitive to crime rate changes even living in similar  neighborhoods in what respect to security. Results also show that who has  already had prior experience with the police is less sensitive independently  of the quality of police job at the time.

   Keywords: Trust in the Police; Institutions; Criminality.

   JEL: G12

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:spa:wpaper:2015wpecon19&r=all

6. Culture, Politics, and Development

   Woolcock, Michael (Harvard University)  Whether in the domains of scholarship or practice, important advances have  been made in recent years in our understanding of how culture, politics, and  development interact. Today's leading theorists of culture and development  represent a fourth distinctive perspective vis-a-vis their predecessors, one  that seeks to provide an empirically grounded, mechanisms-based account of  how symbols, frames, identities, and narratives are deployed as part of a  broader repertoire of cultural "tools" connecting structure and agency. A  central virtue of this approach is less the broad policy prescriptions to  which it gives rise--indeed, to offer such prescriptions would be something  of a contradiction in terms--than the emphasis it places on making intensive  and extensive commitments to engaging with the idiosyncrasies of local  contexts. Deep knowledge of contextual realities can contribute  constructively to development policy by enabling careful intra-country  comparisons to be made of the conditions under which variable responses to  otherwise similar problems emerge. Such knowledge is also important for  discerning the generalizability (or "external validity") of claims regarding  the efficacy of development interventions, especially those overtly engaging  with social, legal, and political issues.

   JEL: Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp14-041&r=all

7. Where Do Social Preferences Come From?

   Chaning Jang (Princeton University, Department of Psychology)

   John Lynham (University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Economics)  Where do preferences for fairness come from? We use a unique field setting to  test for a spillover of sharing norms from the workplace to a laboratory  experiment. Fishermen working in teams receive random income shocks (catching

 fish) that they must regularly divide among themselves. We demonstrate a  clear correlation between sharing norms in the field and sharing norms in the  lab. Furthermore, the spillover effect is stronger for fishermen who have  been exposed to a sharing norm for longer, suggesting that our findings are  not driven by selection effects. Our results are consistent with the  hypothesis that work environments shape social preferences.

   JEL: Q2 C9 C7 B4 D1

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hai:wpaper:201511&r=all

8. Conflicted Emotions Following Trust-based Interaction

   Schniter, Eric

   Sheremeta, Roman

   Shields, Timothy

 We observed reports of conflicted (concurrent positive and negative) emotions  activated after interactions in the Trust game. Our analyses reveal that  activation of 20 emotional states following trust-based interaction is better  explained by predictions derived from a multi-dimensional Recalibrational  perspective than by predictions derived from two-dimensional Valence and  Arousal perspectives. The Recalibrational perspective proposes that emotions  are activated according to their functional features – for example, emotions  help people achieve short or long-sighted goals by up or down-regulating  behavioral propensities, whereas Valence and Arousal perspectives consider  simpler hedonic dimensions lacking functional specificity. The  Recalibrational perspective is also distinguished from the Valence and  Arousal perspectives in that it predicts the possibility of conflicted  emotions. We discuss the theoretical implications of having conflicted goals  and the economic implications of having conflicted emotions.

   Keywords: emotion, affect valence, Recalibrational theory, intrapsychic

    conflict, Trust game

   JEL: C73 C91 D87

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:66154&r=all

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