Healthy trust -mimeo: do not quote-

Abstract

Along the pathway traced by few recent contribution which attempt at identifying the causal effect of social capital, this paper analyzes whether individual social capital reduces the chances of suffering from a number of diseases. The empirical problems explicitly addressed are reverse causation and omitted variables. It results that individuals reporting to “trust most of the other people” are about 16% less likely to incur in a disease. This result is robust to two alternative specifications as well as the inclusion or omission of individual controls.