This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs...

Several papers study the effect of trust by using the answer to the World Values Survey (WVS) question “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” to measure the level of trust. Glaeser et al. (2000) question...