Which Characteristics or Experiences Influence Interpersonal Trust? Comments and Criticism of the Paper "Who trusts others" by Alesina and La Ferrara

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Economics - Statistics and Methods, grade: 1,2, University of Marburg, course: Empirical Institutional Economics, language: English, abstract: In the following I will present the paper “Who trusts others?” from the authors Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara. Afterwards I will comment on the paper, criticise some points of it and finally I will give proposals for further research. The structure of this term-paper is as follows: At first I will give a general introduction into the theoretical basics of this paper. This part will explain why it is important to analyse interpersonal trust and it will contain information about the main research hypothesis of the two authors. The second part is about the data and descriptive statistics of the reference paper. This section will contain information about the most important variables used for the regressions of the paper “Who trusts others?” and it will present the first conclusions about the data. The third segment of this paper will expose the econometric evidence. Here I will give a summary about every table used in the reference paper and explain the most important findings of the regressions. After that there will follow a very short segment where I will summarise the main results of the reference paper. In the last part I will give a comment about the reference paper and will add some criticism. This section will end with proposals for further research based on the current economic perspectives. The paper will end with a short summery of my comments and research proposals.