Do Trust and Trustworthiness Pay Off?
利用18个国家1990年世界价值观调查数据，发现信任态度对收入有正向影响，而可信赖性对收入有负向影响，且可信赖性的回报与一国平均信任水平正相关。
1We would like to thank members of the University of Michigan Public Finance work-shop, and particularly John Bound and Matthew Shapiro, for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Are individuals who trust others better off than those who do not? Do trustwor-thy people prosper more than untrustworthy ones? A matching model can provide testable empirical predictions regarding the relationship between observed individual behavior, average attitudes, and individual prosperity. We evaluate these predic-tions empirically using household-level data for eighteen (mostly developed) coun-tries from the 1990 wave of the World Values Survey. We find that, on average, a trusting attitude has a positive impact on income, while trustworthiness has a negative impact on income. In addition, we find evidence of a positive relationship between the payoff to these two attitudes and the average levels of the complemen-tary attitudes. Most strikingly, the payoff to being trustworthy depends positively on the average amount of trust in a given country. 1