Empirical evidence from developed countries supports the idea that parent-teacher interaction is high and improves student outcomes. The evidence from developing countries is, however, decidedly mixed. Using longitudinal data that we collected from nearly 6,000 students and 600 teachers in rural China, we show that the prevalence of parent-teacher interaction is generally much lower than that o...

The Effect of Divorce Laws on Divorce Rates in Europe This paper analyzes a panel of 18 European countries spanning from 1950 to 2003 to examine the extent to which the legal reforms leading to “easier divorce” that took place during the second half of the 20th century have contributed to the increase in divorce rates across Europe. We use a quasi-experimental set-up and exploit the different t...

The Economic Costs of Mass Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany* Based on official records from the former East German Ministry for State Security, we quantify the long-term costs of state surveillance on social capital and economic performance. Using county-level variation in the spy density in the 1980s, we exploit discontinuities at state borders to show that higher level...

neighborhoods within the hierarchy of urban structure are one of the smallest socio-physical building blocks of cities. traditional neighborhoods of iranian historic cities benefited from strong social relations which were flourished over the years and were manifested in the neighborhoods centers. in the modern era, the new master plans and the complementary local plans have disintegrated these...

This paper uses individual data from Japan to explore how the circumstances of where a person resides are related to the degree of their investment in social capital. Controlling for unobserved area-specific fixed effects and various individual characteristics, I found; (1) Not only that homeownership and length of residence are positively related to investment in social capital, but also that ...

Abstract: We derive convenient uniform concentration bounds and finite sample multivariate normal approximation results for quadratic forms, then describe some applications involving variance components estimation in linear random-effects models. Random-effects models and variance components estimation are classical topics in statistics, with a corresponding well-established asymptotic theory. ...

The goal of this paper is to determine the nature of the causal relationship between "social capital," as measured by household membership in formal and informal groups and household welfare in South Africa. Using a recently collected panel data set in South Africa's largest province, we estimate per capita expenditure functions and find a positive and significant impact of household-level soci...