Individual determinants of social behavior

Universalism vs. particularism: a round trip from sociology to economics

“…Interestingly, as discussed in the previous section, cross-country evidence points in the same direction. Finally, no clear patterns emerge with regard to the age and the urban residence of the respondents (this is in line with most of the previous literature, see for example de Blasio and Nuzzo, 2010).…”

“…The focus, instead, has been on two main conceptualizations of social capital: civicness and network endowment and use. Scholars have concentrated on the mechanisms of accumulation of these different types of social capital (Alesina and La Ferrara, 2002, Glaeser et al, 2002and de Blasio and Nuzzo, 2010 and on the effects of these on economic variables (for example, Saxenian, 1994, Putnam, 1995, Knack and Keefer, 1997, Hall and Jones, 1999and Sacco and Vanin, 2000. The results of the empirical literature can be summarized as follows (see Righi and Scalise, 2013): increasing civicness always turns out to be beneficial for economic growth, while evaluating the impact of larger and denser networks requires considering the balance between the positive and negative externalities generated, some of which would generate a negligible amount of negative externalities spurring economic development, while others could even be detrimental.…”

“…This phenomenon appears to be particularly relevant to the Italian case, as documented, for example, byde Blasio and Nuzzo (2010).11 For a discussion of the advantages of PCA over other methods of constructing indices and aggregating information (such as weighted averages or factor analysis) seeRighi and Scalise (2013).12 One drawback of the use of PCA is represented by the impossibility of studying correlation among components within each dimension, which is zero by construction.…”

Social Capital and the Innovative Performance of Italian Provinces

“…Although recent studies pointed out the dangers of assuming a straightforward correlation between the intensity of ties with family and close friends and the emergence of negative social behaviour (De Blasio and Nuzzo, 2010), the relevance of a preexistent extensive literature building on this hypothesis deserves a deeper analysis. To rule out any doubt in this regard a composite indicator for bonding social capital is computed by following the procedure adopted for the creation of our key regressor.…”

“…Social capital Coherently with the conceptual framework outlined above, the analysis looks at the concept of social capital as propensity towards prosocial behaviour in terms of attitude towards cooperation with anonymous others, participation in groups and associations, and civicness. The rationale for the adoption of this definition is that 'positive' social behaviour tends to be generally associated with more successful economic outcomes (De Blasio and Nuzzo, 2010) and that a greater level of civic engagement and cooperation may, in its turn, facilitate the exchange of economically valuable (often noncodified or tacit) knowledge in 'open' networks. From this perspective we refer to the idea proposed by Burt (1992, page 32) that "people who do better are somehow better connected" and that those people "connected to certain others, trusting certain others, devoted to support certain others" can be identified as structural holes connecting different segments of the society.…”