The agrarian origins of social capital

This paper investigates the agrarian roots of social capital. I show that Italian areas exhibiting a higher share of temporary agricultural workers in the Post-Unification period register lower civic capital today. Spatial analysis and IV estimates using malaria as a source of exogenous variation indicate that the effect is robust even after controlling for social-property relations being not randomly determined. Finally, I demonstrate that institutions affecting the benefits and costs of cultural norms generate persistent effects. I investigate the role of “industrial districts” as a mechanism to transmit the cultural trait of cooperation through time. Since they developed where temporary workers were relatively rare, I find those municipalities exhibiting high civic capital to have a higher propensity to belong to an industrial district.