Conference Agenda

Over the past seven decades, the private car has increasingly symbolized connectivity, social inclusion, and status, contributing to higher automobile usage. This trend has led to significant environmental, economic, and societal challenges, including increased greenhouse gas emissions, air and noise pollution, climate change, traffic fatalities, and health issues like obesity and physical inactivity. As a response, active transportation, especially walking, has gained prominence as a promising strategy to mitigate these concerns while providing community-level benefits, fostering social interactions, and building social capital. Europe’s focus on sustainable mobility and children's physical health since the late 1990s has led to initiatives like Walking School Buses.

This study explores the barriers to full adoption and the challenges encountered by the Walking School Bus service in Ferrara. Using a qualitative approach, the research utilizes semi-structured interviews to collect data from municipal managers, school managers, and parents. Through thematic analysis, five key themes were identified: "social capital," "service considerations," "environmental sustainability," "service interactions," and "willingness to participate." These themes highlight the influence of parental social structure, parents' perspectives on the service, sustainability practices, factors guiding parental decisions, and reasons for low participation or service discontinuation. The findings provide valuable insights to inform policymakers and enhance the implementation of such services.

Principal Topic

While social capital has multiple definitions (see, e.g., Bourdieu, 1985; Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 1995, etc.), it has two common elements: a set of informal values that generates trust and enhances cooperation among members of a group, and a set of networks that facilitates group actions. From a macroeconomic perspective, economists have long recognized that social capital is essential to societal economic success and it promotes economic growth through information sharing and cooperation. Another mechanism through which social capital creates an impact on the economy is that strong social capital benefits corporations at the firm level. With a firm-level focus, this study aims to investigate mainly two research questions. First, what is the impact of social capital on a firm’s operational efficiency? To address the controversial debate on gender diversity in the corporate governance domain, our second research question is: how does the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) gender affect the operational link between social capital and corporate performance?

Methods and Results

We obtain social capital data from the 2018 report, The Geography of Social Capital in America by the Joint Economic committee Republicans. Using a sample of U.S. listed firms (65,481 firm-year observations) over the period from 1996 to 2021, we employ the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to construct the operational efficiency score for all sample firms.

We use the following baseline model to test our research question 1:

"EFFICIENCYt = β0 + β1 SKt + ∑ βi Firm_Level_Controls+ ∑ βj State_Level_Controls "

"+ ∑ βk State + ∑ βl Industry+ ∑ βm YEARt + et"

where the dependent variable is the DEA score of firms, and the variable of interest is social capital. Firm-level control variables (equity market value, market share, free cash flow, firm age, Herfindahl index, foreign business, efficiency lag), state-level control variables (religious adherence, industry effect, per capita GDP, percentage of population growth and population density) and year effect are also included in our model.

Consistent with our expectation, the results indicate that firms in high social capital regions have higher operational efficiency. We further our sensitivity test using an instrumental variable (IV) approach (a state-level measure of racial fragmentation as IV) and find consistent results.

To test for the moderating effect of CEO gender (research question 2), we conduct a cross-sectional analysis including as explanatory variables the interaction terms: SK*FEMALE for all three of the social capital measures in our baseline model. The results suggest that the positive relation between social capital and operational efficiency is more pronounced for firms with female CEOs.

As robustness tests, we use the length of the operating cycle as an alternative proxy for operational efficiency. We find that companies with female CEOs report shorter operation cycles, suggesting higher operational efficiency which is consistent with our baseline results. We further our test by employing county-level social capital data to validate our baseline results, which we computed using state-level measures and find consistent results.

The level of interpersonal trust is declining in most Western societies. This severely damages the coherence of society and hampers the ability of the political system to make and implement transformative change.

The hypothesis that inequality reduces interpersonal trust has been around for a long time. It is clearly visible in cross-sectional data. However, the thesis has never been confirmed in longitudinal designs. The paper attempts to find new approaches to the missing link between the longitudinal null findings and the robust evidence that exists cross-sectionally, in psychology, and is often debated in the policy arena. It does so by ruling out artifacts of insufficiently detailed trust questions.

The hypothesis that the lack of longitudinal evidence of inequality on trust is due to the fact that the change is too small to be statistically detectable as long as it is only tested with yes/no questions seems likely given that there is also a relationship between interpersonal and political trust that has long been undetected due to artifacts. Indeed, many of the most cited papers on inequality and trust use only the reduced index. The problem posed by the lack of differentiation is also easy to understand theoretically: On average, we remember negative memories much better than positive ones. In addition, the only yes/no option makes the question sound even sharper, so a yes can only be expected with very high scores.

Modern societies are complex social structures, characterised by various dimensions of social stratification. As members cannot possibly form connections to all other members, cooperation, and social cohesion rely on generalised social trust, and the absence of prejudice between social groups. One major determinant of trust and prejudice is connectedness: Trust develops in predictable, long-term interactions. Furthermore, the contact hypothesis and social capital theories imply that positive intergroup contact is essential to reducing prejudices, accepting diversity, and generalising trust to the whole population. While this relationship of intergroup contact and trust has mainly been tested with ethnic diversity and ethnic neighbourhood segregation, two important gaps in the literature remain: Much previous literature does not investigate actual interactions in social networks, but only contact possibilities in neighbourhoods, and a major dimension of social stratification—social class—has been largely neglected. At the same time, evidence implies that neighbourhoods, workplace, and friendship networks are segregated with respect to social class. If only few social relationships exist across social class boundaries, less intergroup contact is possible, which could strongly affect generalised social trust. I utilise data from the German National Educational Panel Study and drawing on position generators, I can approximate how many people in occupations from different social classes actors know. I then estimate whether having interclass contacts affects generalised trust and intergroup prejudices. Our findings shed light on the impact of social class segregation on social cohesion and how fostering interclass social networks can mitigate these consequences.