Trust in Public Institutions Over the Business Cycle

By Betsey Stevenson, Justin Wolfers. Social Science Research Network, 2011

249 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We document that trust in public institutions--and particularly trust in banks, business and government--has declined over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions. Cross-country comparisons reveal a clear legacy of the Great Recession, and those countries whose unemployment grew the most suffered the biggest loss in confidence in institutions, particularly in trust in government and the financial sector. Finally, analysis of several repeated cross-sections of confidence within U.S. states yields similar qualitative patterns, but much smaller magnitudes in response to state-specific shocks.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/76a39edffe666fb4fb11fe2d5f328f4ae78de591

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Citations in the corpus

Measuring Financial Inclusion: Explaining Variation in Use of Financial Services across and within Countries (2013, background): “…to analyze the relationship between corruption and confidence in public institutions; by Demirgüç-Kunt and others (2013) to study changes in trust in banks in the wake of the global financial crisis; and by Stevenson and Wolfers (2011) to examine trust in institutions over the business cycle.”
Islamic Finance and Financial Inclusion: Measuring Use of and Demand for Formal Financial Services among Muslim Adults (2013, background): “…(2011) to analyze the relationship between corruption and confidence in public institutions; by Demirguc-Kunt, Klapper, and Zingales (2012) to study changes in trust in banks over the financial crisis; and by Stevenson and Wolfers (2011) to examine trust in institutions over the business cycle.”
Trust in banks (2017, methodology): “Stevenson and Wolfers (2011) provide an investigation of the evolution of trust in various forms of institutions, including banks in the US, from 1972 to 2010.”