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In this paper we propose a measure of social capital based on the behaviour in a public good game. We play the public good game within 28 groups in two similar neighborhoods in Cartagena, Colombia, one of which had been targeted for over two years by a conditional cash transfer program that has an important social component. The level of cooperation we observe in the 'treatment' community is considerably higher than in the 'control' community. The two neighborhoods, however, although similar in many dimensions, turned out to be significantly different in other observable variables. The result we obtain in terms of cooperation, however, is robust to controls for these observable differences. In the last part of the paper we also compare our measure of social capital with other more traditional measures that have been used in the literature.
Authors
CPP Co-Director
Orazio is an International Research Fellow at the IFS, a Professor at Yale and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Luca Pellerano
Sandra Polanía Reyes
Working Paper details
- Publisher
- IFS
Suggested citation
O, Attanasio and L, Pellerano and S, Polanía Reyes. (2008). Building trust? Conditional cash transfers and social capital. London: IFS. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/building-trust-conditional-cash-transfers-and-social-capital (accessed: 26 April 2024).
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