The public health literature focusing on the detrimental effects of social isolation has shown that the quantity of social connections is positively correlated with individual health. Drawing on pooled cross-sectional data, we test this hypothesis on a representative sample of the Italian population. Our findings show that, besides the quantity of interactions, it is their quality – as measured...

Demand for Redistribution, Support for the Welfare State, and Party Identification in Austria This paper describes subjective wage inequality and the demand for redistribution in Austria using individuals' estimates of occupational wages from the International Social Survey Program. Although these estimates differ widely across individuals, the data clearly show that most individuals would like...

Estimates based on couples with dependent children in the first six years of the British Household Panel Study (1991-97) indicate that changes in a couple’s economic circumstances affect the probability that a partnership dissolves. In particular, unexpected improvements in finances substantially reduce the dissolution risk, which strongly supports the importance of new information in decisions...

Pension Coverage for Parents and Educational Investment in Children: Evidence from Urban China When social security is established to provide pensions to parents, their reliance upon children for future financial support decreases; and their need to save for retirement also falls. We use the expansion of pension coverage from the state sector to the non-state sector in urban China as a quasi-ex...

Ethnic German Immigration from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to Germany: the Effects of Migrant Networks This paper employed a widely accepted theoretical concept, the ‘theory of migrant networks’ to look at the recent immigration and absorption experience of ethnic Germans (Aussiedler) from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in Germany. Consistent with network theory, the ...

This study explores the impact of social capital on innovation by constructing a more general measure of social capital indicator consisting of generalized and institutional trust, associational activities and civic norms. We test the hypothesis that social capital has a positive impact on innovation at the national level. After controlling for R&D expenditure and human capital there is a posit...

nowadays the phrase “social capital” has become one of the widely used general terms in social studies. the impact of social capital on economies and politics has expanded and has opened new venues for solving social and political malaise. one of the effects of social capital is its impact on personal welfare. in this article we have used a dynamic model containing two equations to study the im...

Intergenerational Analysis of Social Interaction We explore the relationship between the social interaction of parents and their offspring from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Our theoretical framework establishes possible explanations for the intergenerational transfer of social interaction whereby the social interaction of the parent may influence that of their offspring and vice ...

This article explores individual incentives to produce information on communication networks. In our setting, efforts are strategic complements along communication paths with convex decay. We analyze Nash equilibria on a set of networks which are unambiguous in terms of centrality. We first characterize both dominant and dominated equilibria. Second, we examine the issue of social coordination ...

We propose a decomposition of social welfare when consumers have quasi-linear utility functions under certain conditions satisfied in many models of imperfect competition. In our decomposition, social welfare is expressed as the sum of consumers’ gross utilities and trade surplus of non-numeraire commodities, which contribute to consumers’ utilities non-linearly. This decomposition is useful es...