Essays on social capital and space

The idea of specific values and beliefs as, ceteris paribus, the main explanatory of growth differentials, has recently received lot of attention by social scientists. The focus is in particular to specific shared values and beliefs, constituting a social "stock" of good values fostering growth and cooperation, thus the name, social capital. Unfortunately, social capital is an elastic concept. Moreover, to the extent that social interactions type and strength matter, social capital clearly requires attention for the role of space. Thus, this thesis attempts to clarify some of the issues related to social capital and space. In the first chapter we outline the main questions of this thesis, investigating the concept of social capital through a careful review of the socio-economic literature, where social capital emerges as a multidimensional (and multidisciplinary) topic. Chapter 2 reports on the relevant empirical studies and expands the discussion to consider the relationship between social capital and space. Building on previous considerations, Chapter 3 proposes two new synthetic measures of social capital, analyzing their spatial distribution at regional level in Europe. Finally, the last Chapter explores the link between economic growth and social capital, also within a spatial regression framework, considering several multidimensional measures of social capital, the problem of endogeneity and the weakness of the proposed instruments.