This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We
argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague …

The economic literature analyses cultural transmission as the result of interactions between
purposeful socialization decisions inside the family ('direct vertical socialization') and indirect …

This paper develops a new method to uncover the causal effect of trust on economic growth
by focusing on the inherited component of trust and its time variation. We show that inherited …

This paper presents a survey of the theoretical and empirical literature on cultural
transmission and socialization. It has been prepared for the Handbook of Social Economics …

What explains the range of situations in which individuals cooperate? This paper studies a
model where individuals respond to incentives but are also influenced by norms of good …

We study the importance of family ties on economic behavior. We define our measure of
family ties using individual responses from the World Value Survey (WVS) regarding the role …

What preferences will prevail in a society of rational individuals when preference evolution is
driven by the resulting payoffs? We show that when individuals' preferences are their private …

To explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical
experiences of cooperation (Putnam 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of …

Explanations of economic growth and prosperity commonly identify a unique causal effect,
eg, institutions, culture, human capital, geography. In this paper we provide instead a …

This paper documents the speed of evolution (or lack thereof) of a range of values and
beliefs of different generations of US immigrants, and interprets the evidence in the light of a …