Social capital, cooperation, and the role of schools: evidence from an experiment with children

The experimental literature in economics largely acknowledges the role of social capital in social payoff enhancing behavior and/or voluntary provision of public goods. However, social capital is often measured using different proxies that, in principle, may have different impacts on contributions. In this article, we unpack social capital in three dimensions (i.e., school, family, and friends) and we analyze which dimension matters for contributions in economic experiments. We collect data from an ultimatum game, a trust game, and a public good game carried out with children in primary and secondary schools in Sicily, Italy. To measure social capital, we also collect detailed information on social attitudes related to different contexts. We find that, as expected, social capital matters for contributions. More interestingly, we find that the only component that affects contributions is social capital at school. Our findings shed a light on how the school environment may be extremely important for the formation of social capital, especially when this is linked to behavior within the same environment.