Sociologists, political scientists, and economists all suggest that culture plays a pivotal role in the development of large-scale cooperation. In this study, I used generalized trust as a measure of culture to explore if and how culture impacts intentional homicide, my operationalization of...

It is a coincidence that major reforms are now under way in both financial infrastructure and the Internet. Governments are in the process of overhauling the regulatory framework in response to the 2008 economic crisis. The Internet itself is at a crucial stage of development with the...

The paper further contributes to our understanding about the role of societal trust in influencing mergers outcome. Using a large sample of cross-border mergers across 56 countries between 1985 and 2014, we show that, conditional on announcement of cross-border mergers, larger differences of...

Using a comprehensive international dataset of institutional investor holdings, we study social trust as a source of institutional investment biases. Our findings indicate that national trust-levels affect the investment allocation of institutional investors between domestic and foreign equity...

We introduce the distinction between broad-scope trust and narrow-scope trust in banking. Broad-scope trust corresponds to trust toward a group in general (e.g., banks as a whole); narrow-scope trust toward a specific individual (e.g., bank–firm relationship). Using U.S. syndicated loans...

Using a randomized controlled trial in a 2018 survey of a representative sample of the German population, we study whether providing information about the European Central Bank’s (ECB) inflation record in comparison to its inflation target affects people’s trust in the central bank. In the...

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...

By constructing a unique international database on generalized trust covering 142 countries worldwide for the 41 years from 1980 to 2020, this paper finds a pronounced intertemporal variation of generalized trust over time in a majority of countries across the globe. 3 When analyzing the time...