Does Social Capital Make You Generous?*

Abstract

Objectives. This article tests the hypothesis that social capital—measured in terms of civic group involvement, social and racial trust, and political engagement—leads to charitable behavior by individuals. Methods. I introduce measures of the “social capital elasticity of giving,” which facilitate comparisons between the effects on charity of different social capital types. Using data from the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, I estimate these elasticities with tobit regression models. Results. I find strong links between changes in social capital stocks and changes in giving levels. Furthermore, I find that different social capital types have differing levels of impact on giving. Conclusions. Charitable giving appears to be a beneficial consequence of some types of social capital.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 174 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.