On Representative Social Capital

By Charles Bellemare, Sabine Kröger. Social Science Research Network, 2004

384 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper analyzes data for a random sample drawn from the Dutch population who reveal their capacity to provide and sustain social capital by their propensity to invest and reward investments by means of an economic experiment. We have three main results. First, we find that heterogeneity in behavior is characterized by several asymmetries -- men, the young and elderly, and low educated individuals invest relatively less, but reward significantly more investments. Second, higher expected levels of investments have a positive and significant effect on the level of investments themselves, corroborating the presence of social norms. Third, we compare our results with a laboratory experiment conducted with a student sample. We find that the student sample provides a lower bound of the population level of social capital.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d70b0a0ac811f6025cd7b9de8206f977dbf66a5d

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Citations in the corpus

Microfoundations of Social Capital (2012, positive): “Bellemare and Kröger (2007) find that women exhibit significantly higher trust levels than men in their experimental trust games.”
Measuring Trust: Experiments and Surveys in Contrast and Combination (2009, positive): “However, other studies have found a significant correlation between the survey and the experimental measures (e.g., Vyrastekova & Garikipati 2005, Bellemare & Kroeger 2007, Sapienza et al. 2007).”
Cooperation and Competition in Intergenerational Experiments in (2008, positive): “While we do not measure social preferences, results from Fehr et al. (2002), Bellemare and Kröger (2007) and Sutter and Kocher (2007) suggest that seniors may care more about total social payoffs, since they are more generous as responders in a trust game than are younger people.”
Gender Differences in Preferences (2009, background): “One study, Bellemare and Kroger (2007), finds that men are more reciprocal than women.”
Do strong family ties inhibit trust (2008, background): “It usually covers the entire range, with a distinct modal value of about 50 percent of the truster’s initial endowment and short ‘spikes’ at zero and 100 percent (see Fehr et al., 2002; Bellemare and Kroeger, 2007 (their ‘representative sample’) and Barr, 2003).”
Do short-term laboratory experiments provide valid descriptions of long-term economic interactions? A study of Cournot markets (2013, neutral): “This observation contrasts with most findings in one-shot interaction studies comparing behavior in the lab and internet environments (Bellemare and Kröger 2007; Charness et al. 2007; Fiedler and Haruvy 2009; Füllbrunn et al. 2011, and Hergueux and Jacquemet 2012).6”
Altruistic behavior in a representative dictator experiment (2008, methodology): “In their analysis of the behavior of a random draw of Dutch society in a trust experiment, Bellemare and Kroger (2005) show that females and older people are significantly more trusting and that students, females and people over the ages of 45 are significantly more reciprocal.”
Other Regarding Preferences: A Selective Survey of Experimental Results (2012, background): “Along one dimension, they either assign subjects into groups randomly (minimal-group paradigm) or via their expressed preferences for paintings by 61 See Benjamin, Choi, and Strickland (2010) and Benjamin, Choi, and Fisher (2013) for experiments documenting these sorts of group identity effects.”
Similarities and differences when building trust: the role of cultures (2010, background): “Bellemare and Kröger (2007) find a hump-shaped relation between age and trust 13 and a u-shaped relation between age and trustworthiness.”
A Behavioral Account of the Labor Market: The Role of Fairness Concerns (2008, background): “…that are representative for whole countries such as Germany (Fehr et al 2003; Dohmen et al 2009), the U.S. (Naef et al 2008), and the Netherlands 7 (Bellemare & Kröger 2007; Bellemare et al 2008); it holds under stake levels of up to three months incomes (Cameron 1999; Fehr et al 2002; Slonim &…”
Discrimination in the laboratory: A meta-analysis of economics experiments (2016, background): “This suggests – unlike in the context of social preferences (e.g. Bellemare and Kroger, 2007; Anderson et al, 2013) – student subjects are not a generally unrepresentative sample for questions relating to discrimination.”
Self-selection and variations in the laboratory measurement of other-regarding preferences across subject pools: evidence from one college student and two adult samples (2013, background): “Bellemare and Kröger (2007) use a standard one-shot trust game to compare a sample of undergraduate students with a representative sample of individuals drawn from the general population in the Netherlands.”