In this issue we feature 10 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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1. The Moldable Young: How Institutions Impact Social Trust - Bergh, Andreas; Öhrvall, Richard
2. Individualism, Collectivism, and Trade - Aidin Hajikhameneh; Erik O. Kimbrough
3. The Cultural Foundations of Happiness - Pierluigi Conzo; Arnstein Aassve; Giulia Fuochi; Letizia Mencarini
4. Women's career choices, social norms and child care policies - Barigozzi, Francesca; Cremer, Helmuth; Roeder, Kerstin
5. Gender Peer Effects Heterogeneity in Obesity - Rokhaya Dieye; Bernard Fortin
6. Inspiration From The “Biggest Loser†: Social Interactions In A Weight Loss Program - Kosuke Uetake; Nathan Yang
7. An Overview of Diffusion in Complex Networks - Dunia López-Pintado
8. Horizontal inequality, status optimization, and interethnic marriage in a conflict-affected society - Omar Shahabudin McDoom
9. Assessing the impacts of a training program for women in Peru: Are There social networking effects? Eduardo Zegarra; Angie Higuchi; Ricardo Vargas
10. Over the top: Team composition and performance in Himalayan expeditions - Bernd Frick; Anica Rose

 1. The Moldable Young: How Institutions Impact Social Trust

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

    Öhrvall, Richard (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN))  Social trust is linked to many desirable economic and social outcomes, but  the causality between trust and institutions is debated. Using new data from  a representative sample of 2,668 Swedish expatriates (surveyed in the SOM  Institute’s Swedish Expatriate Survey 2014), we use variation in time spent  in the new country to infer about the effect of country level institutions  and norms (such as corruption perceptions, average trust levels and various  aspects of economic freedom) on social trust. The results suggest that  individual trust suffers in countries with high corruption, low trust and low  legal quality. The effect is relatively small, occurs mainly during the first

 3 to 10 years and is observed only among those aged less than 30 at the time  of arrival in the new country. The results are robust to controlling for a  large array of individual characteristics (including age), and support the  view that social trust is sensitive to events that occur early in life. In  contrast, after the age of approximately 30, trust seems to be a highly  resilient personal trait.

    Keywords: Trust; Social norms; Institutions; Migration

    JEL: D13 D83 J62 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1132&r=soc

 2. Individualism, Collectivism, and Trade

    Aidin Hajikhameneh (Institute for the Study of Religion, Economics and Society, Chapman University)

    Erik O. Kimbrough (Simon Fraser University)  While economists recognize the important role of formal institutions in the  promotion of trade, there is increasing agreement that institutions are  typically endogenous to culture, making it difficult to disentangle their  separate effects. Lab experiments that assign institutions exogenously and  measure and control individual cultural tendencies can allow for clean  identification of these effects. We focus on cultural tendencies toward  individualism/collectivism, which social psychologists highlight as an  important determinant of many behavioral differences across groups and  people. We design an experiment to explore the relationship between subjects’

 dispositions to individualism/collectivism and their willingness to engage in  impersonal trade under enforcement institutions of varying strength. Overall,  we find that individualists tend to engage in trade more often than  collectivists. This effect is mitigated somewhat as the effectiveness of  enforcement institutions increases. That is, the detrimental impact on future  trade of having been cheated in the past is reduced. Nevertheless we see that  cultural dispositions shape the decision to engage in impersonal trade,  regardless of institutional environment.

    Keywords: individualism, collectivism, exchange, trust, experiments

    JEL: C7 C9

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sfu:sfudps:dp17-01&r=soc

 3. The Cultural Foundations of Happiness

    Pierluigi Conzo (Università di Torino, CSEF and Collegio Carlo Alberto)

    Arnstein Aassve (Università Bocconi, Dondena Centre for Research on Social

     Dynamics and Public Policy)

    Giulia Fuochi (Università di Padova)

    Letizia Mencarini (Università Bocconi, Dondena Centre for Research on

     Social Dynamics and Public Policy)

 The paper provides a framework for how culture affects happiness. According  to self-determination theory, well-being is driven by the satisfaction of  three basic psychological needs: autonomy, relatedness and competence. We  assess if, and to what extent, generalized trust and the values of obedience  and respect influence Europeans’ satisfaction of these needs, controlling for  income and education. We find a positive and significant impact for  generalized morality (high trust and respect, low obedience), which is robust  to different checks for endogeneity, including instrumental variable  regressions at country, regional and individual level and panel-data  estimations.

    Keywords: self-determination, culture, trust, subjective well-being, happiness, life satisfaction.

    JEL: A13 E02 P48 I31 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sef:csefwp:466&r=soc

 4. Women's career choices, social norms and child care policies

    Barigozzi, Francesca

    Cremer, Helmuth

    Roeder, Kerstin

 Our model explains the observed gender-specific patterns of career and child  care choices through endogenous social norms. We study how these norms  interact with the gender wage gap. We show that via the social norm a  couple's child care and career choices impose an externality on other  couples, so that the laissez-faire is inefficient. We use our model to study  the design and effectiveness of three commonly used policies. We find that  child care subsidies and women quotas can be effective tools to mitigate or  eliminate the externality. Parental leave, however, may even intensify the  externality and decrease welfare.

    Keywords: Child Care; child care subsidies; parental leave; Social norms; women quotas; women's career choices

    JEL: D13 H23 J16 J22

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11797&r=soc

 5. Gender Peer Effects Heterogeneity in Obesity

    Rokhaya Dieye

    Bernard Fortin

 This paper explores gender peer effects heterogeneity in adolescent Body Mass  Index (BMI). We propose a utility-based non-cooperative social network model  with effort technology. We allow the gender composition to influence peer  effects. We analyze the possibility of recovering the fundamentals of our  structural model from the best-response functions. We provide identification  conditions of these functions generalizing those of the homogeneous version  of the model. Extending Liu and Lee [2010], we consider 2SLS and GMM  strategies to estimate our model using Add Health data. We provide tests of  homophily in the formation of network and reject them after controlling for  network (school) fixed effects. The joint (endogenous plus contextual) gender  homogeneous model is rejected. However, we do not reject that the endogenous  effects are the same.This suggests that the source of gender peer effects  heterogeneity is the contextual effects. We find that peers’ age, parents’

 education, health status, and race are relevant for the latter effects and  are gender-dependent.

    Keywords: Obesity, Social Networks, Gender, Heterogeneity, Peer Effects, Identification, Add Health.

    JEL: L12 C31 Z13 D85

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lvl:crrecr:1702&r=soc

 6. Inspiration From The “Biggest Loser†: Social Interactions In A Weight Loss Program

    Kosuke Uetake

    Nathan Yang

 We investigate the role of heterogeneous peer effects in encouraging healthy  and sustainable lifestyles. Our analysis revolves around one of the largest  and most extensive databases about weight loss, which contains well over 10  million observations that track individual participants’ meeting attendance  and progress in a large national weight loss program. A few key findings  emerge. First, while higher weight loss among average performing peers leads  to lower future weight loss for an individual, the effect of the top weight  loss performer among peers leads to greater future weight loss for that same  individual. Second, the discouraging effects from average peers and  encouraging effects from top performing peers are magnified for individuals  who struggled with weight loss in the past. Third, the encouraging effect of  top performers has a long-run impact on an individual’s weight loss  success. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that the discrepancy between  the top and average performer effects is not likely an artifact of salience  or informativeness of top performers, but instead, driven by its positive  impact on the motivation to accomplish weight loss goals. Given our empirical  findings, we discuss managerial implications on meeting design.

    Keywords: big data, customer development, customer relationship management, healthy and sustainable living, subscription services, weight management

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cch:wpaper:170001&r=soc

 7. An Overview of Diffusion in Complex Networks

    Dunia López-Pintado (Department of Economics, Universidad Pablo de

     Olavide; CORE, Université catholique de Louvain)  We survey a series of theoretical contributions on diffusion in random  networks. We start with a benchmark contagion process, referred in the  epidemiology literature as the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible model, which  describes the spread of an infectious disease in a population. To make this  model tractable, the interaction structure is considered as a heterogeneous  sampling process characterized by the degree distribution. Within this  framework, we distinguish between the case of unbiased-degree networks and  biased-degree networks. We focus on the characterization of the diffusion  threshold; that is, a condition on the primitives of the model that  guarantees the spreading of the product to a significant fraction of the  population, and its persistence. We also extend the analysis introducing a  general diffusion model with features that are more appropriate for  describing the diffusion of a new product, idea, behavior, etc.

    Keywords: degree distribution, random networks, diffusion threshold,endemic state, homophily.

    JEL: C73 L14 O31 O33

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pab:wpaper:17.01&r=soc

 8. Horizontal inequality, status optimization, and interethnic marriage in a conflict-affected society

    Omar Shahabudin McDoom

 Although several theories of interethnic conflict emphasize ties across group  boundaries as conducive to ethnic coexistence, little is known about how such  ties are formed. Given their integrative potential, I examine the  establishment of cross-ethnic marital ties in a deeply divided society and  ask what drives individuals to defy powerful social norms and sanctions and  to choose life-partners from across the divide. I theorize such choices as  the outcome of a struggle between social forces and individual autonomy in  society. I identify two channels through which social forces weaken and  individual autonomy increases to allow ethnic group members to establish ties  independently of group pressures: elite autonomy and status equalization. I  find, first, that as an individual’s educational status increases, and  second, as between-group inequality declines, individuals enjoy greater  freedom in the choice of their social ties. However, I also find that in an  ethnically ranked society this enhanced autonomy is exercised by members of  high-ranked and low-ranked groups differently. Members from high-ranked  groups become more likely to inmarry; low-ranked group members to outmarry. I  suggest a status-optimization logic lies behind this divergent behaviour.

 Ethnic elites from high-ranked groups cannot improve their status through  outmarriage and their coethnics, threatened by the rising status of the  lower-ranked group, seek to maintain the distinctiveness of their status  superiority through inmarriage. In contrast, as their own individual status  or their group’s relative status improves, members of low-ranked groups take  advantage of the opportunity to upmarry into the higher-ranked group. I  establish these findings in the context of Mindanao, a conflict-affected  society in the Philippines, using a combination of census micro-data on over  two million marriages and in-depth interview data with inmarried and  outmarried couples.

    Keywords: horizontal inequality; ethnic conflict; social status; ranked groups; intermarriage; Philippines

    JEL: D74 I2 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:68932&r=soc

 9. Assessing the impacts of a training program for women in Peru: Are There social networking effects?

    Eduardo Zegarra

    Angie Higuchi

    Ricardo Vargas

 The general goal of this study is to assess the impacts on women’s economic  and social participation of a peer-to-peer training program in Cañete  Province, Peru. We use a quasi-experimental methodology applied to treatment  and control groups. The study evaluates three areas of potential effects: (i)  participation and returns from economic activities (use of time, labour  market participation, family business, savings); (ii) indicators of women’s  autonomy, family cohesion and social participation; and (iii) living  standards. The impacts we found are mixed. We only detected robust impacts on  the propensity to engage in savings and participate in local social  organizations by treated women. The channels behind these impacts require  more specific research, but we hypothesize that it may be related to expanded  social networking. We observe a few specific impacts related to autonomy

 (negative) and family cohesion (positive), which can be linked to the  religious nature of the program. We evaluate differentiated effects by some  features of the treatment group as self-assessment of economic usefulness by  women as well as trainers’ education and age. In terms of policy, we consider  that peer-to-peer programs of this type may have limited impacts in terms of  broad development goals like increased income, labour participation and  business activity by women, but these can also show some advantages for  expanding women’s social networking and access to savings and local  organizations. Improved peer-to-peer programs more clearly linked to the  economic advancement of women may be more efficient in achieving broader  development goals.

    Keywords: Human Capital, Human Development, Human Resources, Formal Training Programs, Training, Skill Building, Specific Human Capital,

     Training, Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

    JEL: O15 J24

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lvl:pmmacr:2017-02&r=soc

10. Over the top: Team composition and performance in Himalayan expeditions

    Bernd Frick (Paderborn University)

    Anica Rose (Paderborn University)

 Using a large sub-sample of expeditions from the “Himalayan Database”, we  analyze the impact of a climbing team’s cultural value diversity on various  performance outcomes. Irrespective of an already large (and still growing)  body of theoretical and empirical research on the diversity-performance link,  the study of the multifaceted concept “culture” under rather extreme  conditions has hitherto been largely ignored. We extend the literature by  focusing on the effects of the cultural value diversity of a commercial  climbing team on expedition outcomes. We test our hypotheses using data from

 1,168 expeditions that took place between 1990 and 2014 involving mostly  “amateur” climbers from all over the world. We find that the probability of  team success is positively influenced by a culturally more heterogeneous team  composition. Individual-level analyses further reveal that an increase in a  team member’s cultural distance increases the probability of individual  success, but also the probability of experiencing an injury or death. This  result shows that the higher collective performance in culturally diverse  teams is driven by the isolation of single team members.

    Keywords: team diversity; team performance; cultural value diversity

    JEL: M14

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pdn:dispap:24&r=soc

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