Date of Award

2015

Publisher

North Dakota State University

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Awarded

Master of Science (MS)

Program

Agribusiness and Applied Economics

Department

Agribusiness and Applied Economics

College

Agriculture, Food Systems and Natural Resources

Faculty Advisor

Jackson, Jeremy J.

Description

This thesis examines the relationship between economic freedom and social capital in U.S. contiguous states from the 1980s to the 2000s as there is a shortcoming of literature on the topic. This study develops a composite social capital index that captures important aspects of social capital such as voter turnout, social trust, informal socialization and religious participation. This study finds that the changes in subnational level economic freedom measures have positive significant effects on social capital while the levels of economic freedom measures have no significant effect on social capital. Moreover, no significant link between all government level economic freedom measures and social capital is observed. This study also investigates the link between economic freedom and social trust, used as a measure of social capital in previous studies; no significant link between economic freedom and social trust is investigated.

Rights

NDSU policy 190.6.2

Rights Link

https://www.ndsu.edu/fileadmin/policy/190.pdf

Handle Identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/10365/27456

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