American Economic Review Vol. 106 No. 5 2016

War, Inflation, and Social Capital

Sergei Guriev¹; Nikita Melnikov²

¹ Department of Economics, Sciences Po, 28 rue des Saints-Pères, Paris 75007, France and CEPR, London (e-mail: ) · ² Department of Economics, Higher School of Economics and New Economic School, Strastnoy boulevard 4/3, 72, Moscow 125009 Russia (e-mail: )

Abstract

We use weekly data from 79 Russian regions to measure the impact of economic shocks and proximity to war in Ukraine on social capital in Russian regions. We proxy social capital by the relative intensity of internet searches for the most salient dimensions of pro-social behavior such as “donate blood”, “charity”, “adopt a child” etc. This measure of social capital is correlated with a survey-based measure of generalized social trust. Our search-based measure of social capital responds negatively to the spikes of inflation and positively to the intensity of the conflict in Ukraine (controlling for region and week fixed effects).

DOI

10.1257/aer.p20161067

Volume

106

Issue

5

Pages

230-235

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

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