What Determines Trust? Human Capital vs. Social Institutions: Evidence from Manila and Moscow

It is now well established that highly developed countries tend to score well on measures of social capital and have higher levels of generalized trust. In turn, the willingness to trust has been shown to be correlated with various social and environmental factors (e.g. institutions, culture) on one hand, and accumulated human capital on the other. To what extent is an individual's trust driven by contemporaneous institutions and environmental conditions and to what extent is it determined by the individual's human capital? We collect data from students in Moscow and Manila and use the variation in their height and gender to instrument for measures of their human capital to identify the causal effect of the latter on trust. We find that human capital positively affects the propensity to trust, and its contribution appears larger than the combined effect of other omitted variables including, plausibly, social and environmental factors

Post-Soviet Russian Academia Struggles with the Past

Contemporary Russian higher education remains influenced by the Soviet past. This historical tradition in general makes change and improvement more difficult. A special problem is the tradition of state planning

Faculty Contracts in Post-Soviet Countries

For decades, universities in Soviet countries were governed, evaluated, and financed according to the same principles. The current system is not like this former one. However, faculty contractsa core element in any universitystill participate much in common. While this article is based on detailed data on the academic profession in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Russia, the described trends are, to some extent, common for all post-Soviet countries