TY  - JOUR
AU  - Charles,Kerwin
AU  - Kline,Patrick
TI  - Relational Costs and the Production of Social Capital: Evidence from Carpooling
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9041
PY  - 2002
Y2  - July 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9041
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9041.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Kerwin Kofi Charles
Harris School of Public Policy
University of Chicago
1155 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773.834.8922
Fax: NA
E-Mail: kcharles@uchicago.edu

Patrick M. Kline
Department of Economics
UC, Berkeley
508-1 Evans Hall #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720
Tel: 510/642-4628
E-Mail: pkline@econ.berkeley.edu
AB  - This paper posits that individuals can more easily form social connections with persons of the same race.   If true, the greater the incidence among his neighbors of persons of his race, the more likely an individual is to make neighborhood social capital connections, and the more likely he is to engage in activities which require it.  The paper tests this idea using an indicator of individual social capital never previously studied: whether the person uses a carpool to get to work.  We identify  exogenous variation in adult neighborhood racial makeup arising from the racial makeup of the state in which the person was born in the year that he was born, and relate this exogenous portion of adult neighborhood racial composition to individual carpooling propensity using a TSLS approach. The results from this analysis, and from robustness tests which focus on neighborhoods with virtually identical racial distributions, show evidence of strong cross-racial relational difficulties, but interestingly, only for particular pairs of racial groups.
ER  -