Ricerc@Sapienza

The literature has credited social capital with a role in many economically relevant phenomena, from the efficiency of markets and public institutions to growth. However, the multidimensionality of the concept, the problems in its measurement and the shortage of data have made it difficult to disentangle the sources of social capital and to identify its causal linkage with economic outcomes. This project aims at exploring the roots and the outcomes of social capital by adopting a twofold strategy that relies on new data and methods.

1) As previous studies suggest that the accumulation of social capital is a path dependent process that develops over centuries, we will employ historical analyses to search for exogenous sources of variation of social capital that are rooted in the deep past.
In addition to improving our comprehension of the roots of the phenomenon, this task entails the development of new strategies for reliably identifying the impact of social capital on its hypothetical outcomes.

2) Even though a component of social capital is persistent over time, quick changes in its stock can still occur in response to specific events or policies. The project aims to explore the role of specific exogenous shocks such as terrorism and earthquakes. To this purpose, we will develop a new methodology for measuring social capital and its possible sources of variation "in real time" through the exploitation of big data.

The outcomes of this project will add to the existing literature in three substantial ways, through: 1) The identification of so far unexplored historical sources of social capital. 2) The building and exploitation of novel data sources for building new measurement methods and identification strategies. 3) The provision of the first empirical analysis of how social capital relates to the exogenous shocks possibly determined by terrorism and natural disasters, whose potential effects were never investigated in the economics literature before.