Social Capital and Health: Setting the Stage for the Next Steps

In the last twenty years a new stream of research emerged at the intersection between public health, epidemiology and health economics, with the purpose of studying the relationship between social capital and individual health. The number of published papers, surveys and books dealing with this subject increased exponentially. Despite, there are a few debated issues yet to be settled, including the very definition of social capital, its boundaries and, consequently, its measurement. Identification of causal effects progressed over time. In this talk I briefly mention three attempts to uncover causal effects. In the first, the relationship between social capital and health is estimated by exploiting the exogenous variations in social capital triggered by episodes of crime victimization. The same strategy is applied also in a dynamic context, where a cohort of Britons born in 1956 is followed overtime. Finally, I discuss the ability of social capital to help enforcing public health policies, by showing that individuals richer of social capital reacted more to the introduction of the smoking ban in public places in Germany in 2008.

 

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Publication History

Article published online:
26 May 2020