This paper develops a life cycle model for agricultural households in which social capital is a fixed input into household production. The intertemporal solutions of the model yield four results that are consistent with recent empirical and qualitative literature on social capital and consumption among agricultural households: commodity consumption will rise for an agricultural household in a village where public social capital is increasing - even if the household itself has invested little in their own accumulation of social relations; increased inequality within villages is associated with lower social capital; public social capital will decrease significantly in the presence of migration of young from rural communities; and current consumption levels will be less sensitive to increases in income uncertainty when social capital is increasing. The paper uses information on agricultural households in Tanzania to illustrate the model.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Length: 31 pages Date of creation: Jun 2002 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:mdl:mdlpap:0202
Contact details of provider:
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Janine Podraza).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
Find related papers by JEL classification: D13 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Production and Intrahouse Allocation Q12 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Micro Analysis of Farm Firms, Farm Households, and Farm Input Markets Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Social Norms and Social Capital; Social Networks Economic Anthropology
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: