Based on original survey data, this paper analyses and compares the role of personal traits and social capital in determining entrepreneurial intentions of students in Hong Kong and in Guangzhou (mainland China). The two cities are culturally closely related but differ strongly with respect to...

Large-scale agricultural investments (LSAIs) typically depend on strong formal institutions and market-oriented intensive farming, whereas informal institutions tend to characterize the traditional villages located around them. We investigate changes to social capital in such villages when LSAIs...

This paper assesses the potential for skilled labor migration from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. It utilizes representative surveys from Ghana and Kenya to shed light on the quality and distribution of skills in the labor markets of these countries. Skills in both countries are found to be...

There is a startling gap between, allegedly, globalization-induced changes in international competition for foreign direct investment (FDI) and recent empirical evidence on the relative importance of determinants of FDI in developing countries. We show that surprisingly little has changed since...

This paper analyses the wage premia associated with workers' occupational use of foreign languages in Germany. After eliminating time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity and other confounding factors, sizable returns of about 10 percent to applying fluent English skills are found. Returns to...

This paper substantiates the debate following Richard Florida’s suggestion to measure regional human capital by creative occupations rather than education. Consistent with Florida’s notion of creativity, it suggests a microfoundation that relates creativity to workers’ cognitive and...

We survey the empirical literature in economics on the impact of media technologies on social capital. Motivated by a simple model of information and collective action, we cover a range of different outcomes related to social capital, from social and political participation to interpersonal...

We use detailed data from Indonesian cities to study how variation in density within urban areas affects social capital. For identification, we instrument density with soil characteristics, and control for community averages of observed characteristics. Under plausible assumptions, these...

In this paper--the first in a series of two papers that use data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook to study social capital--we measure and analyze three types of social capital by ZIP code in the United States: (i) connectedness between different types of people, such as those with low vs....

Low levels of social interaction across class lines have generated widespread concern and are associated with worse outcomes, such as lower rates of upward income mobility. Here, we analyze the determinants of cross-class interaction using data from Facebook, building upon the analysis in the...