Essays on Social Capital and Wellbeing

This thesis is comprised of four empirical papers. The first paper (coauthored with Stefano Bartolini, Marcin Pieka lkiewicz and Francesco Sarracino), entitled “Social capital reduces the impact of social comparisons on subjective wellbeing: Evidence from international datasets”, uses EU-SILC, ESS and EVS-WVS cross-sectional data, and German SOEP panel data to show that social capital changes the association between income and subjective wellbeing, and the one between social comparisons and subjective wellbeing. The paper also tests the hypothesis that at the macro-level, in countries that are rich in social capital, the differences in subjective wellbeing between income groups are small, which is a consequence of the relatively smaller impact that income and social comparisons exert on wellbeing. The second paper, entitled “The wellbeing effects of social capital in times of a health crisis: the case of the Covid-19 pandemic”, uses monthly UKHLS data to assess whether social capital influenced the way people fared throughout the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper provides a theoretical intuition of the mechanisms via which social capital affects wellbeing and mental health in times of a health crisis, and provides evidence that social capital is beneficial to subjective wellbeing as it allows resilience. The third paper, entitled “Loneliness increases the probability of worse mental distress development during Covid-19” uses latent class analysis, a non-parametric model, to explore the heterogeneity in mental distress development in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic. It subsequently relates individuals’ loneliness, a measure of lack of social capital, to the probability of being on either class of distress development. Results suggest that the probability of being on a trajectory of continuously high distress was significantly higher for people who are often or sometimes lonely, compared to non-lonely people. The last paper (coauthored with Stefano Bartolini and Francesco Sarracino), entitled “Do epidemics impose a trade-off between freedom and health? Evidence from Europe during Covid-19” analyses whether the extent to which governments imposed stringent containment policies in face of the pandemic was determined by the trust levels of citizens. Additionally it tests whether less stringent containment policies came at the expense of health. The findings suggest the trade-off between freedom and health depends on the levels of trust, in particular that the trade-off reduces with higher levels of trust. The conclusions of these papers all point to the need of promoting social capital as a critical element for people’s and societal wellbeing.