Social Capital, Networks, and Economic Wellbeing

Scholars and policy makers alike are increasingly interested in understanding how social capital shapes people's economic lives. But the idea of social capital is an amorphous one. In this article, economists Judy Hellerstein and David Neumark define social capital as networks of relationships among people who are connected by where they live or work. Thus social capital, in contrast to human capital, resides in the connections among people rather than their individual characteristics.