Social capital and social economics

The “discovery” of social capital in the early 1990s led to an upsurge of research into the economic impact of social cohesion and governmental effectiveness. This paper outlines key developments in the social capital literature over the past 13 years. It then examines theory and evidence of the links between social cohesion, quality of governance, economic performance and human welfare. The literature indicates that social capital makes a measurable contribution to economic development and overall wellbeing, particularly in developing countries. Partly in response to this emerging body of evidence, there has been increased interest in the application of community development principles to economic development initiatives. This paper argues that the advent of social capital theory represents a partial convergence between social economics and mainstream economics, and signifies an increased acceptance that economic activity cannot be meaningfully “disembedded” from social and political context.     

社会资本与企业技术创新的关系分析

迄今为止,众多学者把社会学领域已被公认的社会资本概念嫁接到经济学领域,由此社会资本也就逐渐成为研究经济发展的一个新视角。值得注意的是,社会资本对宏观经济发展和增长的影响和冲击是多层次、多角度的,即它可以通过人力资本存量的提升、金融部门的发展以及企业技术革新等方面来刺激宏观经济又好又快的发展。然而,本文尝试从企业所拥有的内部社会资本出发,并以几个相关的实证研究结果作为基础和前提条件,构建社会资本与企业技术创新的理论模型,在此基础上对二者关系进行探讨和分析。但是,有关社会资本与企业技术创新二者关系的实证性研究还有待于我们做进一步的、更为详细的分析和探讨。     

企业社会资本:理论与实证研究述评

大量研究表明,社会资本是企业重要的战略资源和有效的治理机制,因而企业社会资本理论成为当前经济学和管理学研究的前沿领域之一。本文在已有文献的基础上,对企业社会资本的概念界定、分析维度和测量方法方面的研究进行了归纳;并从公司治理、融资行为、技术创新和企业家4个方面,对现有关于企业社会资本与企业绩效之间关系的实证研究进行了梳理。最后,就企业社会资本理论的发展现状和趋势进行了简要总结。     

Social capital and social economics

The “discovery” of social capital in the early 1990s led to an upsurge of research into the economic impact of social cohesion and governmental effectiveness. This paper outlines key developments in the social capital literature over the past 13 years. It then examines theory and evidence of the links between social cohesion, quality of governance, economic performance and human welfare. The literature indicates that social capital makes a measurable contribution to economic development and overall wellbeing, particularly in developing countries. Partly in response to this emerging body of evidence, there has been increased interest in the application of community development principles to economic development initiatives. This paper argues that the advent of social capital theory represents a partial convergence between social economics and mainstream economics, and signifies an increased acceptance that economic activity cannot be meaningfully “disembedded” from social and political context.     

Reconsidering social capital: a latent class approach

Social capital has proven to be a useful concept, but has not been well-measured in the economics literature. We motivate and demonstrate the application of latent class models to measure social capital, based on the idea that social capital is an unobservable multidimensional construct. We explain and show the construction of latent classes that measure an individual’s social capital using data from the General Social Survey. Our method generates meaningfully different conclusions about the accumulation of social capital than those obtained by previous research. We present evidence that higher income influences social capital accumulation because of a higher opportunity cost of time. We also find evidence of complementarities in social capital accumulation within an individual’s peer group. Finally, we show that community heterogeneity influences the likelihood that individuals adhere to certain social norms independent of their propensity to participate in voluntary organizations.     

Experimental economics under the microscope

Although experimental economics has been one of the most rapidlyexpanding fields in economics in recent years, it has so farattracted little sustained methodological discussion. This paperis intended as a step towards filling the gap, and providespreliminary answers to the following questions. (i) What aredistinctive characteristics of the experimental method in economics?(ii) To what extent are the results obtained in the laboratorytransferable to non-laboratory situations? (iii) What are thelimits of the experimental method in economics? (iv) Why isit that experimentation, which has been so successful in thenatural sciences, remains so controversial in the social sciences.     

A Pathway Forwards for the Social Capital Metaphor

A major topic in economics is the analysis of a broad class of phenomena associated with interpersonal relationships, a topic that originally grew from theories of “social capital.” While the concept has been instrumental in bringing increased attention to social effects on economic outcomes, it has increasingly been replaced with approaches that consider instead networks and discrete interactions rather than aggregate measures of social capital. This has been an analytical improvement, but a great deal of work remains to bring empirical validity and relevancy to social network analysis. This paper presents two important approaches for achieving this, statistical analysis and agent-based modeling, and discusses their benefits, limitations, and complementary nature. Rather than waiting for either approach to achieve an ambiguous quality of maturity, integrating statistical analysis with simulation models of networks must begin now to push the frontiers of social network analysis forward.     

The <Emphasis Type="Italic">Acting</Emphasis> Person: Social Capital and Sustainable Development

Ron Stanfield has had a long and distinguished career as a social economist and commentator on the social economy. Of special concern to us in this article are Stanfield’s interests in social capital, sustainable development, and nurturance which we refer to as caring. We also take up several other virtues including sympathy, benevolence, and generosity that have been part of the economics literature from the time of Smith’s Moral Sentiments along with the associated vices of heartlessness, insensitivity, meanness, greediness, and others. This article attempts to show that (1) adding social capital to the machine-like individual of mainstream economics results in the acting person of personalist economics who becomes more fully a human person through social interactions that foster the development of several virtues or less fully a human person through other interactions that instill certain vices; and that (2) in matters relating to sustainability, becoming more fully a human person calls especially for the practice of the virtues of justice and moderation. In addition we have suggested a framework for thinking about sustainable development in terms of actuating and limiting principles and for developing critical values or performance standards for sustainable development that are person-centered.     

企业家社会资本与企业创业绩效关系——基于陕西省经验的实证分析

企业家人力资本对创业绩效的贡献作用一直备受主流经济学的关注,但是,伴随着新经济时代的到来,单纯的人力资本已不能充分解释企业不断增长的问题,尤其是创业企业的绩效差异问题。因而,企业家社会资本开始受到理论界的关注。文章以陕西创业企业为例,通过与人力资本相比较,采取实证方法对企业家社会资本对创业绩效的影响进行具体分析。运用主成分分析法对企业家社会资本和创业绩效分别作归类分析。以创业绩效为因变量,企业家社会资本和人力资本及它们的交叉项为自变量,建立多元线性回归模型。分析结果表明,企业家社会资本对创业绩效的贡献作用远远超过人力资本,并在文章最后对此现象进行解释。     

社会资本与经济发展:理论及展望

随着社会资本理论的发展，发展经济学演进到新的发展阶段———“社会关系至关重要”。社会资本理论的引入丰富了经济发展理论研究思路：发展中国家需要构造以社会资本为纽带的综合经济发展体系；在全球化背景下，协调社会资本与现代经济发展是经济学面临的课题。     

社会资本影响因素的经验研究

社会资本日益成为社会学、经济学、管理学和政治学等多学科共同研究的热点,不同学科的理论分析和经验研究都发现社会资本可以对经济增长、社会稳定及企业的发展起到很好的推动作用。但是对于社会资本的产生以及哪些因素可以提升企业的社会资本却没有较好的研究,笔者试图通过对上市公司的实证分析发现影响企业社会资本的内部与外部因素,以帮助企业能够有针对性地提升自己的社会资本。     

社会资本经济分析研究综述

自世界银行开展一系列社会资本研究项目之后,经济学家们开始了将社会资本融入到经济分析框架的努力。文章概述经济学领域内社会资本的概念、社会资本形成和社会资本作用机制的经济分析等方面研究新进展。     

协同产业空间上制度激励下的资本漂移——产业资本流动的数理逻辑

在一有效的市场内,面对制度的变化,资本都会做出响应,进而调整其所处的产业位点,达到其单位资本收益的最大化.但是对某一产业的制度激励,其他的产业资本会如何调整,调整多少,最终处在哪个产业位点上,怎么用数学语言描述这一调整？这是分析的空白.为有效地探讨资本流动并回答上述问题,可从电动力学中获得启发,即先构造产业资本活动的背景空间,定义制度激励、激励分布函数及成本和收益分布函数,采用成本-收益和演绎的分析方法,给出制度激励和资本漂移项的数理通路,并探讨外生参量与此漂移项的关系,这在某种程度上丰富了社会科学中测度科学的发展,为经济学研究的精确化道路提供了新的视角.     

The Changing Distribution of Income: Evidence and Explanations

This article is concerned with the economics of the distribution of income, emphasizing aspects which have been missing from the recent literature. It begins with factor shares and the rise in real interest rates. These are important in their own right and in relation to the determination of wage differentials. The paper questions the conventional wisdom which locates rising inequality and unemployment solely in a shift in demand away from unskilled workers. This explanation is too partial in its approach, is hard to reconcile with the empirical evidence, and ignores labour market institutions and the role of social norms. In seeking to explain the experience of different countries, we need to look not just at wages but also at the capital market, and should not be limited to a simple competitive supply-and-demand story.     

Participatory Economic Research: Benefits and Challenges of Incorporating Participatory Research into Social Economics

Participatory action research (PAR) and community-based participatory research (CBPR) involve traditional subjects of research in the co-creation of research design, data collection, and analysis. PAR has been used in the fields of public health, education, and geography. A case study of a local economy CBPR project will be discussed. The increasing use of field and behavioral experiments in economics together with recent critiques of the ethical commitments of economic policy raises important questions about the role of expert knowledge, indigenous knowledge, and the relationships of power and privilege involved in mainstream academic research. The applicability of the PAR method for economics will be investigated in light of the epistemological and ethical commitments of social economics.     

中国经济学家应关注人际关系问题

本文在分析人际关系尚未纳入西方主流经济分析之中及没有得到西方经济学家的普遍重视和认可之后，指出重视人际关系是最具特色的中国文化传统，提出人际关系作为人际资本，人际资本就是资本化的的交易成本的独到见解，并进行深入细致的分析、研究。     

增值税改革、资本和资本有机构成:基于马克思主义政治经济学的视角*

本文在全面介绍马克思主义政治经济学中关于资本及资本有机构成分析框架及论断的基础上,利用我国2005—2015年地级市的面板数据,采用双重差分模型全面考察了增值税转型和“营改增”两次改革对地区资本及资本有机构成的影响。本文研究发现：增值税转型后固定资本投入增加,可变资本投入相对减少,资本有机构成进一步提高;而“营改增”后,固定资本和可变资本投入均有增长,但资本有机构成相对下降。本文检验了马克思主义政治经济学对资本及资本有机构成论断在我国的现实意义,对进一步加强应用马克思主义政治经济学指导我国财税制度改革进行了有益尝试。     

Does social capital determine innovation? To what extent?

This paper deals with two questions: Does social capital determine innovation in manufacturing firms? If it is the case, to what extent? To deal with these questions, we review the literature on innovation in order to see how social capital came to be added to the other forms of capital as an explanatory variable of innovation. In doing so, we have been led to follow the dominating view of the literature on social capital and innovation which claims that social capital cannot be captured through a single indicator, but that it actually takes many different forms that must be accounted for. Therefore, to the traditional explanatory variables of innovation, we have added five forms of structural social capital (business network assets, information network assets, research network assets, participation assets, and relational assets) and one form of cognitive social capital (reciprocal trust). Based on the survey data administered from April to June 2000 to 440 manufacturing firms of diverse industries in a region in the southwest of Montréal, we have found that 68.5% of the firms have developed product or process innovations during the 3 years preceding the survey. Assuming that innovation is not a discrete event but a complex process, we have modeled the decision to innovate as a two-stage decision-making process: in the first stage, the firms deal with the decision about whether to innovate or not whereas, at the second stage, the firms that have decided to innovate must make a decision about the degree of radicalness of the innovation to undertake. In a context where empirical investigations regarding the relations between social capital and innovation are still scanty, this paper makes contributions to the advancement of knowledge in providing new evidence regarding the impact and the extent of social capital on innovation at the two decision-making stages considered in this study. Regarding the decision to innovate or not that firms must initially make, we have provided strong evidence that diverse forms of social capital influence this decision and, more importantly, that marginal increases in social capital, especially in social capital taking the forms of participation assets and relational assets, contribute more than any other explanatory variable to increase the likelihood of innovation of firms. As for the decision to be made at the second stage concerning the magnitude of radicalness to bring in the development of new product or process innovations, this paper contributes to the advancement of knowledge by supplying the strongest evidence that diverse forms of social capital determine the radicalness of innovation, and more importantly, that social capital taking the form of research network assets contributes more than any other explanatory variable to explain the radicalness of innovation. The second variable that exerts the strongest impact on the radicalness of innovation is the number of different advanced technologies employed by firms for production.     

语言的经济学分析:一个综述

本文对语言经济学这门新兴交叉学科的产生与兴起、研究现状及其学科定位等进行了总结和评述。语言经济学孕育于民族主义问题之中,发端于加拿大的官方语言问题,它的兴起成就于人力资本理论和教育经济学。语言经济学有广义与狭义之分。广义上,语言经济学采用经济学的理论、方法及工具,把语言和言语行为当作普遍存在的社会和经济现象来加以研究;狭义上,语言与劳动收入关系研究、语言政策与语言规划的经济学分析、语言动态发展的经济学分析以及博弈论在语言学中的应用等构成了当前语言经济学研究的主要内容。伴随着经济的全球化,语言经济学的重要性正在提升,一方面,语言经济学为语言学的相关研究提供了新的视角和思路,带来新的分析工具;另一方面,它也正在为经济学自身提供新的研究话题。     

社会资本:融入企业经济学分析框架的思考

社会资本作为第三种资本形式要融入企业经济学的分析框架,不仅应给出它的确切含义,还应区别它与人力资本及其组织资本之间的关系,而且更为重要的是应解决它从哪里分析、在那里运行的问题。笔者认为,企业的本质是团队生产,企业的团队生产不仅放大了对物质资本的利用,形成和累积了团队成员的个人型人力资本,而且还创造出了不能分解到个人身上的团队型人力资本。组织资本与个人型人力资本相关,社会资本则与团队型人力资本相联系。它们的相互作用共同构成了企业的团队生产方式及其效率来源。