Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/93552 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
UPSE Discussion Paper No. 2012-19
Publisher: 
University of the Philippines, School of Economics (UPSE), Quezon City
Abstract: 
It is now well established that highly developed countries tend to score well on measures of social capital and have higher levels of generalized trust. In turn, the willingness to trust has been shown to be correlated with various social and environmental factors (e.g. institutions, culture) on one hand, and accumulated human capital on the other. To what extent is an individual's trust driven by contemporaneous institutions and environmental conditions and to what extent is it determined by the individual's human capital? We collect data from students in Moscow and Manila and use the variation in their height and gender to instrument for measures of their human capital to identify the causal effect of the latter on trust. We find that human capital positively affects the propensity to trust, and its contribution appears larger than the combined effect of other omitted variables including, plausibly, social and environmental factors.
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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