Generalized trust is a stable value that is transmitted from parents to children. Do its roots go back further in time? Using a person's ethnic heritage (where their grandparents came from) and the share of people of different ethnic backgrounds in a state, I ask whether your own ethnic...

There are multiple dimensions of trust. The standard meaning I call strategic trust. But more important is moralistic trust, which does not stem from experience, but rather is learned early in life and is largely stable over time. Moralistic trust leads people to do good works such as...

Trust in both people and in government are in short supply in transition countries. Corruption is generally very high and the quality of the legal systems are also not high. First, we examine some aggregate data showing that transition countries with increasing inequality also are likely to have...

Transition countries are short on both trust in people and trust in government. Scarcity and corruption meant that ordinary citizens had to use informal connections to accomplish everyday tasks. Ordinary people also regularly had to make extra quot;giftquot; payments to doctors and government...

The importance of social trust has become widely accepted in the social sciences. A number of explanations have been put forward for the stark variation in social trust among countries. Among these, participation in voluntary associations received most attention. Yet, there is scant evidence...

This comment on critique of trust and its measurement argues that it misses the mark, and that there is neither a theoretical nor an empirical foundation for thinking that the macro and micro foundations of trust or its measurement are different from each other. Generalised trust is more than a...

Using data from US states, we find a positive relationship between trust and growth. According to our results, a 10 percentage point increase in trust increases the growth rate of per capita income by 0.5 percentage point, growth rate of housing prices by 1.25 percentage points, and the growth...