ReLunch Seminar: Andrea Martinangeli (Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, Munich)

Tuesday, March 23, 2021, 12:30, online

Institutional quality causes social trust: Experimental evidence on trusting under the shadow of doubt

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Next ReLunch seminar: Andrea Martinangeli (Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, Munich), will present

“Institutional quality causes social trust: Experimental evidence on trusting under the shadow of doubt”
 

Tuesday, March 23, 12:30

Online through Zoom
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Abstract
Social trust is a crucial ingredient for successful collective action. What causes social trust to develop, however, remains poorly understood. The quality of political institutions has been proposed as a candidate driver and has been shown to correlate with social trust. We show that this relationship is causal. We begin by documenting a positive correlation between quality of institutions, measured by embezzlement, and social trust using survey data. We then take the investigation to the laboratory: We first exogenously expose subjects to different levels of institutional quality in an environment mimicking public administration embezzlement. We then measure social trust among the participants using a trust game. Coherent with our survey evidence, individuals exposed to low institutional quality trust significantly less.

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