In this issue we feature 11 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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In this issue we have:

1. Economic Growth and Evolution of Gender Equality - Tatiana Damjanovic; Geethanjali Selvaretnam

 2. Social Closure, Surnames and Crime - P. Buonanno; P. Vanin

 3. The Perils of Peer Punishment: Evidence from a Common Pool Resource Experiment - de Melo Gioia; Piaggio Matías

 4. To friends everything, to strangers the law? An experiment on contract enforcement and group identity - Marian Panganiban

 5. Social capital impact in Vietnam pepper supply chain management - Bui, Anh Kim

 6. On the interpretation of World Values Survey trust question - global expectations vs. local beliefs - Ritwik Banerjee

 7. Equality Concerns and the Limits of Self-Governance in Heterogeneous Populations - Lata Gangadharan; Nikos Nikiforakis; Marie Claire Villeval

 8. The Contexts of Social Inclusion - Hilary Silver

 9. Social interactions in inappropriate behavior for childbirth services: theory and evidence from the Italian hospital sector - Guccio, C.;; Lisi, D.;

10. The Logic of Collective Action and Beyond - Roger D. Congleton

11. Social network analysis using Stata - Thomas Grund

 1. Economic Growth and Evolution of Gender Equality

    Tatiana Damjanovic

    Geethanjali Selvaretnam

 We put forward a theoretical growth model where the degree of gender equality  evolves towards the value maximising social output. It follows that a womans  bargaining power positively depends on her relative productivity. When an  economy is less developed, physical strength is quite important for  production and therefore the total output is bigger when the man has larger  share of the reward. As society develops and accumulates physical and human  capital, the woman becomes more productive, which drives social norms towards  gender equality. By endogenising gender balance of power we can explain why  it di¤ers across societies and how it evolves over the time.

    Keywords: gender inequality, economic growth, female bargaining power,

     human capital, natural resources

    JEL: C72 C73 D13 J16 O41 O43

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gla:glaewp:2015_20&r=soc

 2. Social Closure, Surnames and Crime

    P. Buonanno

    P. Vanin

 This paper studies the effect of social closure on crime and tax evasion  rates using disaggregated data for Italian municipalities. It measures the  degree of social openness of a community by the diversity of its surname  distribution, which reflects the history of migration and inbreeding. It  shows that, all else equal, communities with a history of social closure have  lower crime rates and higher tax evasion rates than more open communities.

 The effect of social closure is likely to be causal, it is relevant in  magnitude, statistically significant, and robust to changes in the set of  included controls, in the specific measures of dependent and independent  variables, in the specification of the regression equation, and in the  possible sample splits. Our findings are consistent with the idea that social  closure strengthens social sancions and social control, thus leading to more  cooperative outcomes in local interactions, but it reduces cooperation on a  larger scale.

    JEL: A14 K42 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1032&r=soc

 3. The Perils of Peer Punishment: Evidence from a Common Pool Resource Experiment

    de Melo Gioia

    Piaggio Matías

 We provide experimental evidence on the effects of social disapproval by  peers among communities of Uruguayan small-scale fishers exploiting a common  pool resource (CPR). We combined this treatment with an in-group (groups from  a single community) / mixed group (groups composed of fishers from different

 communities) treatment. We find that mixed groups, unlike in-groups, reduce  their exploitation of the resource in response to the threat of punishment.

 Both in in-groups and mixed groups there is substantial antisocial  punishment, which leads to increased extraction of the CPR by those who are  unfairly punished. These findings indicate that effective peer punishment  requires coordination to prevent antisocial targeting and to clarify the  social signal conveyed by punishment.

    Keywords: Social disapproval; Social preferences; Common pool resource.

    JEL: D03 O12 C93

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

 4. To friends everything, to strangers the law? An experiment on contract enforcement and group identity

    Marian Panganiban (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods,

     Bonn, and Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena)  Although the role of formal and informal institutions in promoting economic  growth and sustaining exchange relations is now well established, explaining  and differentiating how informal and formal rules affect individual behavior  remain a challenge. This study aims to distill the essential characteristics  of formal and informal institutions and disentangle their effects on trust  and performance in exchange relations through a laboratory experiment. Formal  institutions are modeled as third-party contract enforcement while informal  institutions are represented as shared group identity. Results show that  trust choices increase as contract enforcement increases but are not affected  by shared group identity. However, performance is more likely to occur in  interactions with in-group members than out-group members.

    Keywords: institutions, exchange relations, contract enforcement, group

     identity, laboratory experiments

    JEL: C72 C91 D03 D81

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2015-015&r=soc

 5. Social capital impact in Vietnam pepper supply chain management

    Bui, Anh Kim

 This article develops a set of indicators to assess social capital of the  Vietnamese pepper supply chain in the three main aspects, i.e. trust, norm,  and network. Likert scale is used to quantify the magnitude of the social  capital and to calculate the social capital index. Then, the research  evaluates the impact of social capital on the performance of the Vietnamese  pepper supply chain using the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Finally,  implications of the influence of social capital in supply chain management  are discussed. This study contributes to the literature of social capital and  SEM methodology.

    Keywords: social capital, supply chain, Structural Equation Modelling,

     pepper, Vietnam, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy,

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:gewi15:209255&r=soc

 6. On the interpretation of World Values Survey trust question - global expectations vs. local beliefs

    Ritwik Banerjee (Department of Economics and Business, Aarhus University,

     Denmark)

 How should we interpret the World Values Survey (WVS) trust question? We  conduct an experiment in India - a low trust country, to correlate the WVS  trust question with trust decisions in an incentivized Trust Game. Evidence  supports findings from one strand of the fractured literature - the WVS trust  question captures expectations about others’ trustworthiness, though not  always. We show that WVS trust question correlates with globally determined  stable expectations but does not correlate with short term locally determined  fluctuations in beliefs about trustworthiness. One implication of our study  is that survey based methods may not be used to measure contextualized  beliefs.

    Keywords: Corruption, Social Capital, Social Norm, Trust Games

    JEL: C91 C92 D03

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aah:aarhec:2015-19&r=soc

 7. Equality Concerns and the Limits of Self-Governance in Heterogeneous Populations

    Lata Gangadharan (Monash University, Department of Economics - Monash University)

    Nikos Nikiforakis (New York University Abu Dhabi - Abu Dhabi)

    Marie Claire Villeval (GATE Lyon Saint-Étienne - Groupe d'analyse et de

     théorie économique - ENS Lyon - École normale supérieure - Lyon - UL2 -

     Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - UCBL - Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 -

     Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Etienne - PRES Université de Lyon - CNRS)  Mechanisms to overcome social dilemmas provide incentives to maximize  efficiency. However, often – such as when agents are heterogeneous – there is  a trade-off between efficiency and equality. Agents' concerns for equality in  such instances can limit the ability of mechanisms to promote efficiency. We  provide evidence for this from a public good experiment using a simple  mechanism which allows individuals to communicate periodically with other  group members and reward them for their actions. We show that, in homogeneous  populations – where there is no tension between efficiency and equality – the  mechanism permits group to obtain maximum efficiency. This is not the case in  heterogeneous populations where individuals derive different benefits from  cooperation. Although almost all heterogeneous groups agree to follow  specific contribution rules with positive contributions, most of them either  prioritize equality over efficiency or strike a compromise between the two.

 These findings suggest that equality concerns can impose limits on the  ability of heterogeneous populations to reach efficient outcomes through  self-governance.

    Keywords: Communication, rewards, cooperation, normative conflict,

     heterogeneity

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01208230&r=soc

 8. The Contexts of Social Inclusion

    Hilary Silver

 In light of the emphasis on “inclusion” in the Sustainable Development Goals  (SDGs), this paper contends that social exclusion and inclusion are  context-dependent concepts in at least three senses. First, the ideal of an  inclusive society varies by country and by region. Second, different places  have different histories, cultures, institutions and social structures. These  influence the economic, social and political dimensions of social exclusion  and the interplay among them. Third, context – where one lives – shapes  access to resources and opportunities. Social inclusion is thus spatially  uneven. The paper also shows how context matters, identifying some of the  mechanisms by which nation-states and localities influence processes of  economic, social, and political exclusion and inclusion.

    Keywords: Social inclusion, social exclusion, groups, inequality

    JEL: I31 I38 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:une:wpaper:144&r=soc

 9. Social interactions in inappropriate behavior for childbirth services: theory and evidence from the Italian hospital sector

    Guccio, C.;

    Lisi, D.;

 Empirical evidence supports the conjecture that social interactions among  agents can produce both positive and negative effects. We build on this  literature by exploring the role of social interactions in the hospital  sector using the large incidence of cesarean sections, usually considered an  inappropriate outcome in the childbirth service. In doing so, we lay out a  simple model of hospitals’ behavior where the effect of peers’ behavior  emerges simply by sharing the same institutional authority responsible for  auditing inappropriate behavior. In this setting, enforcement congestion  induces a peer effect among hospitals that could make inappropriate behaviors  more likely. Then, using the risk-adjusted cesarean section rate of a large  panel of Italian hospitals, we empirically investigate whether the behavior  of each hospital is affected by the behavior of hospitals withinthe same  region, after controlling for demand, supply, and financial factors. In  particular, our empirical test employs both peer effects estimate and the  spatial econometric approach, exploiting the panel dimension of our data.

 Both estimates show a significant and strong presence of peer effects among  hospitals. We interpret this evidence as a presence of constraint  interactions within the hospital sector, which has important implications for  healthcare policies against inappropriateness.

    Keywords: social interactions; peer effects; cesarean section; spatial

     econometrics;

    JEL: I11 C31

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:yor:hectdg:15/17&r=soc

10. The Logic of Collective Action and Beyond

    Roger D. Congleton (West Virginia University, Department of Economics)  This article provides an overview of Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective  Action and its impact on Olson’s subsequent work. It also suggests that the  implications of his simple, elegant, theory have not yet been fully worked  out. To illustrate this point, the second half of the essay demonstrates that  the number of privileged and latent groups and their costs in a given society  are not entirely determined by economic factors or group size alone.

 Politics, technology, and culture also matter.

    Keywords: collective action

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wvu:wpaper:15-23&r=soc

11. Social network analysis using Stata

    Thomas Grund (Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University,

     Sweden)

 The field of social network analysis is one of the most rapidly growing  fields of the social sciences. Social network analysis focuses on the  relationships that exist between individuals (or other units of analysis)  such as friendship, advice, trust, or trade relationships. Network analysis  is concerned with the visualization and analysis of network structures, as  well as with the importance of networks for individuals’ propensities to  adopt different kinds of behaviors. Up until now such analyses have only been  possible to perform using specialized software for network analysis. This  tutorial introduces the so-called nwcommands, a software suite with over 80  Stata commands for social network analysis. The software includes commands  (and dialog boxes) for importing, exporting, loading, saving, handling,  manipulating, replacing, generating, visualizing, and animating networks. It  also includes commands for measuring various properties of the networks and  the individual nodes, for detecting network patterns and measuring the  similarity of different networks, as well as advanced statistical techniques  for network analysis including MR-QAP and ERGM.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:boc:usug15:21&r=soc

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