Social Capital Value Add

Thanks to Fabio Sabatini who is himself a social capital gateway.

I have not found the time to manage to even read the abstracts below, but I have lifted the titles from Fabio’s newletter below that I would love to read and write about.  Maybe you have a few cycles to cover one?

NEP: New Economics Papers
Social Norms and Social Capital

In this issue we have:

1. A trust-driven financial crisis. Implications for the future of financial markets
   Luigi Guiso
2. Civic Capital as the Missing Link
   Luigi Guiso; Paola Sapienza; Luigi Zingales
4. Ideological Segregation Online and Offline
   Matthew Gentzkow; Jesse M. Shapiro
5. The Economic Value of Virtue
   Mariani, Fabio
6. The Causes of Corruption: Evidence from China
   Bin Dong; Benno Torgler
7. Leader-Member Exchange, Communication Frequency and Burnout
   Leslie N. Graham; Arjen van Witteloostuijn
8. Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Financial Performance: Evidence from Korea
   Choi, Jong-Seo; Kwak, Young-Min; Choe, Chongwoo
10. 
    

Contents.

1. A trust-driven financial crisis. Implications for the future of financial markets

   Date:	2010
   By:	Luigi Guiso
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eui:euiwps:eco2010/07&r=soc
   The financial crisis has brought to light diffuse opportunistic behaviour and some serious frauds.Because of this trust towards banks, bankers, brokers and the stock market has collapsed to unprecedented levels and there are so far no signs of recovery. This paper uses survey-based information to document the collapse of trust, show its link to the emergence of frauds in the financial industry and discuss its consequences for the demand of financial instruments, investors portfolios and more generally investors reliance on financial markets. It argues that unless serious changes happen in the behaviour of the financial industry, the move towards safer portfolios and away from ambiguous securities that lack of trust entails, will have adverse effects on the availability and cost of equity financing. Accordingly a number of proposals to restore trust are discussed. Their common feature is to restore trust – a belief – by limiting the scope for opportunistic behaviour through a transfer of power from financial intermediaries to investors.

2. Civic Capital as the Missing Link

   Date:	2010
   By:	Luigi Guiso Paola Sapienza Luigi Zingales
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eui:euiwps:eco2010/08&r=soc
   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 and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs that help cooperation—which for clarity we label civic capital. We argue that this definition differentiates social capital from human capital and satisfies the properties of the standard notion of capital. We then argue that civic capital can explain why differences in economic performance persist over centuries and discuss how the effect of civic capital can be distinguished empirically from other variables that affect economic performance and its persistence, including institutions and geography.

4. Ideological Segregation Online and Offline

   Date:	2010-04
   By:	Matthew Gentzkow Jesse M. Shapiro
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15916&r=soc
   We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideological segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline news consumption, and face-to-face social interactions, we define ideological segregation in each domain using standard indices from the literature on racial segregation. We find that ideological segregation of online news consumption is low in absolute terms, higher than the segregation of most offline news consumption, and significantly lower than the segregation of face-to-face interactions with neighbors, co-workers, or family members. We find no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time.
   JEL:	D83

5. The Economic Value of Virtue

   Date:	2010-04
   By:	Mariani, Fabio (Université Catholique de Louvain)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp4875&r=soc
   Virtue is modeled as an asset that women can use in the marriage market: since men value virginity in prospective mates, preserving her virtue increases a woman’s chances of marrying a high-status husband, and therefore allows for upward social mobility. Consistent with some historical and anthropological evidence, we find that the prevalence (and the value) of virginity, across societies and over time, can be influenced by socio-economic factors such as male income inequality, gender differences, social status and stratification, and overall economic development.
   Keywords:	mating, marriage, cultural values, social classes, gender
   JEL:	D1

6. The Causes of Corruption: Evidence from China

   Date:	2010-03-25
   By:	Bin Dong (QUT) Benno Torgler (QUT)
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:qut:dpaper:257&r=soc
   In this study we explore in detail the causes of corruption in China using two different sets of data at the regional level (provinces and cities). We observe that regions with more anti-corruption efforts, histories of British rule, higher openness, more access to media and relatively higher wages of government employees are markedly less corrupt; while social heterogeneity, regulation, abundance of resource and state-owned enterprises substantially breed regional corruption. Moreover, fiscal decentralization is discovered to depress corruption significantly, while administrative decentralization fosters local corruption. We also find that there is currently a positive relationship between corruption and economic development in China that is mainly driven by the transition to a market economy.
   Keywords:	Corruption; China; Government; Decentralization; Deterrence; Social Heterogenity
   JEL:	D73

7. Leader-Member Exchange, Communication Frequency and Burnout

   Date:	2010-04
   By:	Leslie N. Graham Arjen van Witteloostuijn
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:use:tkiwps:1008&r=soc
   In a field study of 128 middle-managers in similar roles but in different organizations within the UK public sector, we find that the quality of their leadermember exchange (LMX) relationship with their immediate supervisor is negatively related to the three dimensions of burnout. As hypothesized, LMX and communication frequency are found to interact in the prediction of emotional exhaustion. For low-quality LMX, the relationship between communication frequency and emotional exhaustion is positive with an increasingly steep upward slope as communication frequency increases. For high-quality LMX, the relationship is not as expected, but is curvilinear with an inverted U-shape. The findings support the importance of the social context of the workplace for the development and persistence of burnout. The results indicate that the quality of the relationship between employees and their manager in combination with the nature and the frequency of their interpersonal interactions are important factors for employee wellbeing. Furthermore, the study contributes to the literature on LMX by providing further support for the importance of LMX being dependent on how frequently employees and managers interact for a new and very important outcome of emotional exhaustion.
   Keywords:	Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), Communication Frequency, Burnout

8. Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Financial Performance: Evidence from Korea

   Date:	2010-04-17
   By:	Choi, Jong-Seo Kwak, Young-Min Choe, Chongwoo
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:22159&r=soc
   This paper studies the empirical relation between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate financial performance in Korea using a sample of 1122 firm-years during 2002-2008. We measure corporate social responsibility by both an equal-weighted CSR index and a stakeholder-weighted CSR index suggested by Akpinar et al. (2008). Corporate financial performance is measured by ROE, ROA and Tobin’s Q. We find a positive and significant relation between corporate financial performance and the stakeholder-weighted CSR index, but not the equal-weighted CSR index. This finding is robust to alternative model specifications and several additional tests, providing evidence in support of instrumental stakeholder theory.
   Keywords:	corporate social responsibility; corporate financial performance; KEJI index; instrumental stakeholder theory
   JEL:	M14