%0 Generic
%A Attanasio, O.
%A Pellerano, L.
%A Polania, S.
%C London, UK
%D 2008
%F discovery:14746
%I Institute for Fiscal Studies
%K C92, D7, D85, H41
%N WP08/0
%T Building trust? Conditional cash transfers and social capital
%U https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/14746/
%X In this paper we propose a measure of social capital based on the behaviour in a public good  game. We play the public good game within 28 groups in two similar neighborhoods in  Cartagena, Colombia, one of which had been targeted for over two years by a conditional cash  transfer program that has an important social component. The level of cooperation we observe in  the ‘treatment’ community is considerably higher than in the ‘control’ community. The two  neighborhoods, however, although similar in many dimensions, turned out to be significantly  different in other observable variables. The result we obtain in terms of cooperation, however, is  robust to controls for these observable differences. In the last part of the paper we also compare  our measure of social capital with other more traditional measures that have been used in the  literature.