Relational Costs and the Production of Social Capital: Evidence from Carpooling

55 Pages Posted: 8 Jul 2002 Last revised: 16 Sep 2022

See all articles by Kerwin Kofi Charles

Kerwin Kofi Charles

University of Michigan - Department of Economics & Ford School; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Patrick Kline

University of California, Berkeley - Department of Economics

Date Written: July 2002

Abstract

This paper posits that individuals can more easily form social connections with persons of the same race. If true, the greater the incidence among his neighbors of persons of his race, the more likely an individual is to make neighborhood social capital connections, and the more likely he is to engage in activities which require it. The paper tests this idea using an indicator of individual social capital never previously studied: whether the person uses a carpool to get to work. We identify exogenous variation in adult neighborhood racial makeup arising from the racial makeup of the state in which the person was born in the year that he was born, and relate this exogenous portion of adult neighborhood racial composition to individual carpooling propensity using a TSLS approach. The results from this analysis, and from robustness tests which focus on neighborhoods with virtually identical racial distributions, show evidence of strong cross-racial relational difficulties, but interestingly, only for particular pairs of racial groups.

Suggested Citation

Charles, Kerwin K. and Kline, Patrick, Relational Costs and the Production of Social Capital: Evidence from Carpooling (July 2002). NBER Working Paper No. w9041, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=318466

Kerwin K. Charles (Contact Author)

University of Michigan - Department of Economics & Ford School ( email )

611 Tappan Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220
United States

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Patrick Kline

University of California, Berkeley - Department of Economics ( email )

508-1 Evans Hall #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
United States

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