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Showing results 1 to 8 of approximately 8.
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Working Paper
In-migration and Dilution of Community Social Capital
Consistent with predictions from the literature, we find that higher levels of in-migration dilute multiple dimensions of a community's level of social capital. The analysis employs a 2SLS methodology to account for potential endogeneity of migration.
Journal Article
District Digest: Measuring Social Capital Across the Fifth District
How cliquey is your community? How often do people from different income groups in your area befriend one another? Do your neighbors volunteer their time to charitable causes? Social scientists have long studied social capital — the strength and value of social networks within communities — as well as its effects on economic, health, and political outcomes. Political scientists have linked higher civic engagement with the strength of democratic institutions, while economists have studied the role that friendships across socioeconomic statuses might have in fostering economic mobility.
Working Paper
Individual Social Capital and Migration
This paper determines how individual, relative to community, social capital affects individual migration decisions. We make use of nonpublic data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey to predict multidimensional social capital for observations in the Current Population Survey. We find evidence that individuals are much less likely to have moved to a community with average social capital levels lower than their own and that higher levels of community social capital act as positive pull-factor amenities. The importance of that amenity differs across urban/rural locations. We also ...
Journal Article
Confronting Challenges, Exploring Solutions
In order to strengthen our economy in ways that enable greater economic mobility and prosperity, we must invest in opportunity. By investing in opportunity, we have the ability to empower people to build wealth and create value, to foster revitalization and promote resiliency in places that have experienced disinvestment, to invigorate civic engagement, and to mitigate the risks that poverty presents to our economic system. We are excited to explore ways to invest in opportunity both in this publication and throughout the 2018 Reinventing Our Communities conference
Working Paper
Wage Determination in Social Occupations: The Role of Individual Social Capital
We make use of predicted social and civic activities (social capital) to account for selection into "social" occupations. Individual selection accounts for more than the total difference in wages observed between social and nonsocial occupations. The role that individual social capital plays in selecting into these occupations and the importance of selection in explaining wage differences across occupations is similar for both men and women. We make use of restricted data from the 2000 decennial census and the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. Individual social capital is ...
Working Paper
Social Capital and Mortgages
Using comprehensive mortgage-level data, we discover that the social capital of the community in which households live positively influences the likelihood of the approval of their mortgage applications, the terms of approved mortgages, and the subsequent performance of those mortgages. The results hold when conditioning on extensive household and community characteristics and a battery of fixed effects, including individual effects, data permitting, and when employing instrumental variables and propensity score matching to address identification and selection concerns. Concerning causal ...
Working Paper
Your Friends, Your Credit: Social Capital Measures Derived from Social Media and the Credit Market
Chetty et al. (2022a) introduced an array of social capital measures derived from Facebook friendships and found that one of these indicators, economic connectedness (EC), predicted upward income mobility well. Bricker and Li (2017) proposed the average credit score of a community's residents as an indicator of local social trust. We show in this paper that the average credit scores are robustly correlated with EC, negatively correlated with the friending-bias measure introduced in Chetty et al. (2022b), and predict economic mobility to a comparable extent after controlling for EC. The ...
Working Paper
Credit Scores, Social Capital, and Stock Market Participation
While a rapidly growing body of research underscores the influence of social capital on financial decisions and economic developments, objective data-based measurements of social capital are lacking. We introduce average credit scores as an indicator of a community's social capital and present evidence that this measure is consistent with, but richer and more robust than, those used in the existing literature, such as electoral participation, blood donations, and survey-based measures. Merging unique proprietary credit score data with two nationwide representative household surveys, we show ...