IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/halshs-00410530.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Voluntary Participation as a Determinant of Social Capital in France : Allowing for Parameter Heterogeneity

Author

Listed:
  • Marie Lebreton

    (GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Katia Melnik

    (GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of income, education and active memberships in voluntary organizations and clubs on "social capital" by using individual French data and allowing for parameter heterogeneity (Durlauf and Fafchamps, 2003). Survey responses to the questions concerning trust, social norms and individual involvement in the local life are used as proxies of social capital. The model developed in this paper is an Artificial Neural Network model or more precisely the Neuro-Coefficient Smooth Transition Auto-Regressive (NCSTAR) model. It gives a vector of estimates for every observation of the dataset as a nonlinear function of its geographical position and its individual attributes. We show that accounting for parameter heterogeneity considerably improves the fit of the estimated model in comparison with the broadly used multinomial logit model. Our results suggest empirical evidences of significant positive direct and indirect effects of active membership in voluntary organizations on trust (or rather trustworthiness, Glaeser et al, 2000) and individual's involvement in his or her community's life. This finding supports the considering of membership in voluntary organizations in France as promoting the values of cooperation and positive tendency towards public issues. However, the studied relationships are not stable across French departments and some regional patterns are detected.

Suggested Citation

  • Marie Lebreton & Katia Melnik, 2009. "Voluntary Participation as a Determinant of Social Capital in France : Allowing for Parameter Heterogeneity," Working Papers halshs-00410530, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00410530
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00410530
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00410530/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stephen Knack & Philip Keefer, 1997. "Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 112(4), pages 1251-1288.
    2. S. N. Durlauf, "undated". "The Memberships Theory of Poverty: The Role of Group Affiliations in Determining Socioeconomic Outcomes," Institute for Research on Poverty Discussion Papers 1221-01, University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty.
    3. Charles F. Manski, 2000. "Economic Analysis of Social Interactions," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 14(3), pages 115-136, Summer.
    4. Durlauf,S.N. & Fafchamps,M., 2003. "Empirical studies of social capital : a critical survey," Working papers 12, Wisconsin Madison - Social Systems.
    5. Marcelo C. Medeiros & Alvaro Veiga, 2003. "Diagnostic Checking in a Flexible Nonlinear Time Series Model," Journal of Time Series Analysis, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(4), pages 461-482, July.
    6. McMillen, Daniel P., 1996. "One Hundred Fifty Years of Land Values in Chicago: A Nonparametric Approach," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 100-124, July.
    7. Edward L. Glaeser & David Laibson & Bruce Sacerdote, 2002. "An Economic Approach to Social Capital," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 112(483), pages 437-458, November.
    8. Schumacher, Martin & Ro[ss]ner, Reinhard & Vach, Werner, 1996. "Neural networks and logistic regression: Part I," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 21(6), pages 661-682, June.
    9. Rech, Gianluigi & Teräsvirta, Timo & Tschernig, Rolf, 1999. "A simple variable selection technique for nonlinear models," SFB 373 Discussion Papers 1999,26, Humboldt University of Berlin, Interdisciplinary Research Project 373: Quantification and Simulation of Economic Processes.
    10. Steven N. Durlauf, 2002. "On the Empirics of Social Capital," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 112(483), pages 459-479, November.
    11. Alesina, Alberto & La Ferrara, Eliana, 2002. "Who trusts others?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(2), pages 207-234, August.
    12. Medeiros, Marcelo & Veiga, Alvaro, 2000. "A Flexible Coefficient Smooth Transition Time Series Model," SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 360, Stockholm School of Economics, revised 29 Apr 2004.
    13. Langche Zeng, 1999. "Prediction and Classification with Neural Network Models," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 27(4), pages 499-524, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hilber, Christian A.L., 2010. "New housing supply and the dilution of social capital," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(3), pages 419-437, May.
    2. Sabatini, Fabio, 2006. "The Empirics of Social Capital and Economic Development: A Critical Perspective," Knowledge, Technology, Human Capital Working Papers 12097, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM).
    3. Greiner, Ben & Ockenfels, Axel & Werner, Peter, 2012. "The dynamic interplay of inequality and trust—An experimental study," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 81(2), pages 355-365.
    4. Beugelsdijk, S. & Smulders, J.A., 2009. "Bonding and Bridging Social Capital and Economic Growth," Discussion Paper 2009-27, Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research.
    5. Antonio C. David & Carmen A. Li, 2010. "Exploring the links between HIV|AIDS, social capital and development," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 22(7), pages 941-961.
    6. Shideler, David W., 2004. "Determinants Of Individual Social Capital Investment," 2004 Annual meeting, August 1-4, Denver, CO 20224, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    7. Dufhues, Thomas & Buchenrieder, Gertrud & Fischer, Isabel, 2006. "Social capital and rural development: literature review and current state of the art [Sozialkapital und ländliche Entwicklung: Literaturüberblick und gegenwärtiger Stand der Forschung]," IAMO Discussion Papers 96, Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO).
    8. Feigenberg, Benjamin & Field, Erica M. & Pande, Rohini, 2010. "Building Social Capital through Microfinance," Working Paper Series rwp10-019, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    9. Thomas Dohmen & Armin Falk & David Huffman & Uwe Sunde, 2012. "The Intergenerational Transmission of Risk and Trust Attitudes," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 79(2), pages 645-677.
    10. Sutter, Matthias & Kocher, Martin G., 2007. "Trust and trustworthiness across different age groups," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 59(2), pages 364-382, May.
    11. Leila Ali & Marie Lebreton, 2013. "The Fall of Bretton Woods: Which Geography Matters?," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 33(2), pages 1396-1419.
    12. Fabio Sabatini, 2005. "The empirics of social capital and economic development. A critical perspective," Development and Comp Systems 0512015, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Bellemare, Charles & Kroger, Sabine, 2007. "On representative social capital," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 51(1), pages 183-202, January.
    14. Lebreton, Marie, 2005. "The NCSTAR model as an alternative to the GWR model," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 355(1), pages 77-84.
    15. Yamamura, Eiji, 2008. "The role of social capital in homogeneous society: Review of recent researches in Japan," MPRA Paper 11385, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. Lorenzo Rocco & Elena Fumagalli & Marc Suhrcke, 2014. "From Social Capital To Health – And Back," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 23(5), pages 586-605, May.
    17. D'ANGELO Emanuela & LILLA Marco, 2007. "Is there more than one linkage between Social Network and Inequality?," IRISS Working Paper Series 2007-12, IRISS at CEPS/INSTEAD.
    18. repec:zbw:iamodp:92017 is not listed on IDEAS
    19. Matthias Sutter & Martin Kocher, 2004. "Age And The Development Of Trust And Reciprocity," Royal Economic Society Annual Conference 2004 105, Royal Economic Society.
    20. Shoji, Masahiro & Aoyagi, Keitaro & Kasahara, Ryuji & Sawada, Yasuyuki & Ueyama, Mika, 2012. "Social Capital Formation and Credit Access: Evidence from Sri Lanka," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 40(12), pages 2522-2536.
    21. Paolo Vanin, 2013. "Social and civil capital," Chapters, in: Luigino Bruni & Stefano Zamagni (ed.), Handbook on the Economics of Reciprocity and Social Enterprise, chapter 31, pages 306-317, Edward Elgar Publishing.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Neural network models; Social capital; Parameter heterogeneity; Neural network models.;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00410530. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.