Working Paper
Social capital, political connections, and household Enterprises
Social capital and political connections can play an important role in developing countries where markets fail and institutions are weak. This paper explores their role in household micro-enterprise operation and success in the rural low-income...
Working Paper
Rebuilding Rural Livelihoods and Social Capital
Mozambique has now enjoyed eight years of peace after a 16-year war that massively damaged the economy, caused over a million deaths, and displaced more than 3 million people. This paper aims to improve our understanding of how rural societies...
Working Paper
Economics Theories of the Household
The aim of this paper is to review the principal assumptions and aspects of the unitary household model and collective models of household behaviour. Empirical studies are presented to assess whether the theories can offer adequate descriptions of...
Working Paper
Individual Motivation, Its Nature, Determinants and Consequences for within group Behaviour
The paper deals with evaluating the adequacy of the assumption that in economic transactions people are self-interested insofar as they are motivated solely by the concern of maximizing their own utility, and in particular with assessing how this...
Working Paper
Social capital and household vulnerability
Using the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) with a panel of households present from 2008 to 2016, the study investigates the impact of social capital on household vulnerability. The empirical results indicate that both commune...
Working Paper
The social consequences of organized crime in Italy
Organized crime affects security, development, and democracy worldwide, but not much is known about its social consequences. We study how exposure to the presence of organized crime groups shapes the social capital of Italian citizens, including...
Working Paper
Social and political capital in rural Vietnam
This paper exploits five waves of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) to investigate issues of social and political capital in rural Vietnam. I analyse membership of the Communist Party, ‘mass organizations’ (Farmers’ Union...
Working Paper
Context and Policies for the Transformation and Growth of SMEs
This paper analyses the Hungarian experience with SMEs development by highlighting the factors and policies that explain the sector features and dynamics and utilizes this experience to suggest an interpretation of the striking differences with...
Working Paper
Is a Friend in Need a Friend Indeed?
Mutual insurance has been shown, theoretically and empirically, to be incomplete and limited by asymmetric information and lack of enforcement mechanisms. While some research has shown that networks based on kinship, neighbourhood and ethnicity may...
Working Paper
Risk-Sharing and Endogenous Network Formation
In economic literature insurance networks are often treated as exogenous institutions. Frequently, the assumption is made that some clearly identifiable group (e.g. ‘the whole village’ or ‘the extended family’) constitutes an insurance network. Still...