Antonie Knigge | Utrecht University (original) (raw)

Papers by Antonie Knigge

American Journal of Sociology, 2014

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

American Sociological Review, 2014

The modernization thesis claims that intergenerational social mobility increased over time due to... more The modernization thesis claims that intergenerational social mobility increased over time due to industrialization and other modernization processes. Here, we test whether this is indeed the case. We study approximately 360,000 brothers from 189,000 families covering more than 500 municipalities in the Netherlands and a 70-year period (1827 to 1897). We complement these sibling- and family-level data with municipal indicators for the degree of industrialization, mass communication, urbanization, educational expansion, geographic mobility, and mass transportation. We analyze these data by applying sibling models, that is, multilevel regression models where brothers are nested in families, which in turn are nested in communities. We find that the total—unmeasured—family effect on sons’ status attainment decreases slightly and is higher than that found for contemporary societies. The measured influence of the family, operationalized by father’s occupational status, decreased gradually...

npj science of learning, Mar 1, 2024

We study to what extent schools increase or decrease environmental and genetic influences on educ... more We study to what extent schools increase or decrease environmental and genetic influences on educational performance. Building on behavioral genetics literature on gene-environment interactions and sociological literature on the compensating and amplifying effects of schools on inequality, we investigate whether the role of genes and the shared environment is larger or smaller in higher-quality school environments. We apply twin models to Dutch administrative data on the educational performance of 18,384 same-sex and 11,050 opposite-sex twin pairs, enriched with data on the quality of primary schools. Our results show that school quality does not moderate genetic and shared-environmental influences on educational performance once the moderation by SES is considered. We find a gene-environment interplay for school SES: genetic variance decreases with increasing school SES. This school SES effect partly reflects parental SES influences. Yet, parental SES does not account for all the school SES moderation, suggesting that school-based processes play a role too.

Acta Politica

Whether educational attainment compensates for or reinforces family disadvantages in political pa... more Whether educational attainment compensates for or reinforces family disadvantages in political participation is currently a debated topic. Previous research has shown a consistent relationship between social origin and political participation in Western societies: individuals originating from low-socioeconomic-status families participate in politics less than those from high-socioeconomic-status families, which violates the democratic requirement of equality of political voice. In this paper, we investigate whether secondary education compensates for or reinforces the political inequality shaped by social origin. We used a German representative sample of 1012 identical twins aged 21–25 and applied family fixed effects regression models, which allowed us to control for measured and unmeasured social and genetic confounding. We found a positive effect of educational attainment on participation, which is most likely causal. Family disadvantage resulting from low parental education is c...

Education, occupation, and income have been long considered as powerful predictors of political p... more Education, occupation, and income have been long considered as powerful predictors of political participation in Western societies, indicating that voices of people with different socioeconomic status are not expressed to the same extent in politics. However, whether education, occupation, and income have causal effects on political participation is questionable; as well as whether education has an absolute or relative effect on political participation. We contribute to this discussion by estimating the effects of education, occupational status, and income on political participation on a sample of identical twins from Germany. By applying family fixed effects regression models, we take into account unmeasured confounding effects of the social environment and genes. We found that education has a positive effect on political participation that is most likely causal. We did not find effects of occupational status and income on political participation. We conclude that education is not ...

Previous research has shown a consistent effect of social origin on political participation: peop... more Previous research has shown a consistent effect of social origin on political participation: people originating from low-socioeconomic-status families participate in politics less than people from high-socioeconomic-status families, – which violates the democratic premise and one of the most fundamental human rights – equality of political voice. We investigated in this paper whether education compensates or reinforces the political inequality shaped by social origin. We used a German representative sample of 1,046 identical twins of 21-25 years old and applied family fixed effects regression models, which allowed to control for measured and unmeasured genetic and social confounding. We found a positive causal effect of educational attainment on participation. Family disadvantage caused by low parental education is compensated by children obtaining intermediate or high levels of education. At the same time, family advantage originating from high parental occupational status is reinf...

European Sociological Review

We investigate the influence of the classroom environment on educational performance and its depe... more We investigate the influence of the classroom environment on educational performance and its dependency on parental socio-economic status (SES). The classroom environment can have a compensatory effect and decrease educational inequality, in which case the classroom context is more important for children originating from lower SES families. Alternatively, there can be an amplifying effect, in which case the classroom environment is more important for high-SES children. This would increase educational inequality. We investigate the two alternatives by applying a twin design to data from 4,216 twin pairs from the Netherlands Twin Register (birth cohorts 1991–2002). Some twin pairs share a classroom and other twins from the same pair are in different classrooms. We use this fact to decompose the variance in educational performance at the end of primary school into four components: genetic variance, classroom variance, shared environmental variance, and non-shared environmental variance...

npj Science of Learning

There are concerns that ability tracking at a young age increases unequal opportunities for child... more There are concerns that ability tracking at a young age increases unequal opportunities for children of different socioeconomic background to develop their potential. To disentangle family influence and potential ability, we applied moderation models to twin data on secondary educational track level from the Netherlands Twin Register (N = 8847). Delaying tracking to a later age is associated with a lower shared environmental influence and a larger genetic influence on track level in adolescence. This is in line with the idea that delaying tracking improves equality of opportunity. Our results further suggest that this is mostly because delaying tracking reduces the indirect influence of family background on track level via the test performance of students. Importantly, delaying tracking improves the realization of genetic potential especially among students with low test scores, while it lowers shared environmental influence on track level for students of all test performance levels.

The History of the Family

Historical Life Course Studies

In this study we ask the question to what extent 19th-century university professors were a closed... more In this study we ask the question to what extent 19th-century university professors were a closed occupational group in the sense that they had little intergenerational and marriage mobility. We do so in honor of Kees Mandemakers, who is about to retire as a professor, but whose younger family members may follow in his footsteps. We derive competing hypotheses from cultural capital theory and the meritocracy thesis and test them using civil marriage records for the period 1813–1922 in six Dutch provinces (N = 1,180,976 marriages). Although only 4.4% of all university professors had a father in the same occupation, the odds ratio of 331 shows that this is much more likely than to be expected under independence. Similarly, professors were much more likely to marry the daughter of a professor. Compared to other elite occupations the intergenerational immobility of professors was not especially high, but their marriage immobility was exceptional. Cultural capital theory receives more su...

An old Dutch proverb says, “If you’re born a nickel, you’ll never become a dime,” meaning it is d... more An old Dutch proverb says, “If you’re born a nickel, you’ll never become a dime,” meaning it is difficult to escape the social class into which you are born. The fact that siblings often attain a similar occupational status shows that there is at least some truth in this. A classic sociological theory—modernization theory—claims that while family origin largely determined status attainment in traditional societies, modernization processes such as industrialization and educational expansion have increased the scope for social mobility. In the present study, Antonie Knigge has designed an original way to test whether this claim is true. He has used digitized information from Dutch marriage certificates from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This has allowed him to measure lack of social mobility not only with the conventional indicator, the similarity in occupational status between parents and children, but also with a more encompassing indicator, the similarity of occupatio...

European Sociological Review

While previous research has conclusively established that children with higher cognitive ability ... more While previous research has conclusively established that children with higher cognitive ability and those originating from advantaged socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds have better educational outcomes, the interplay between the influences of cognitive ability and social origin has been largely overlooked. The influence of cognitive ability might be weaker in high-SES families as a result of resource compensation, and stronger in high-SES families owing to resource multiplication. We investigate these mechanisms while taking into account the possibility that the association between cognitive ability and educational attainment might be partly spurious due to unobserved genetic and environmental influences. We do so by analysing a large sample of twins from the German TwinLife study (Npairs = 2,190). Our results show that the association between cognitive ability and educational attainment is to a large extent confounded by genetic and shared environmental factors. If this is not...

Studies on intergenerational social mobility usually examine the extent to which social positions... more Studies on intergenerational social mobility usually examine the extent to which social positions of one generation determine the social positions of the next. This study investigates whether the persistence of inequality can be expected to stretch over more than two generations. Using a multigenerational version of GENLIAS, a large-scale database containing information from digitized Dutch marriage certificates during 1812–1922, this study describes and explains the influence of grandfathers and great-grandfathers on the occupational status attainment of 119,662 men in the Netherlands during industrialization. Multilevel regression models show that both grandfather's and great-grandfather's status influence the status attainment of men, after fathers and uncles are taken into account. Whereas the influence of the father and uncles decreases over time, that of the grandfather and great-grandfather remains stable. The results further suggest that grandfathers influence their grandsons through contact but also without being in contact with them. Although the gain in terms of explained variance from using a multigenerational model is moderate, leaving out the influence of the extended family considerably misrepresents the influence of the family on status attainment.

Games, Jan 1, 2010

If actors want to reach a particular goal, they are often better off forming collaborative relati... more If actors want to reach a particular goal, they are often better off forming collaborative relations and investing together rather than investing separately. We study the coordination and cooperation problems that might hinder successful collaboration in a dynamic network setting. We develop an experiment in which coordination problems are mainly due to finding partners for collaboration, while cooperation problems arise at the investment levels of partners who have already agreed to collaborate. The results show that as costs of forming links increase, groups succeed less often in solving the coordination problem. Still, if subjects are able to solve the coordination problem, they invest in a suboptimal way in the network good. It is mostly found that if cooperation is successful in terms of investment, it is due to subjects being able to monitor how much their partners invest. Moreover, subjects deal better with the coordination and cooperation problems as they gain experience.

The authors describe and explain variation in the occupational status resemblance of brothers in ... more The authors describe and explain variation in the occupational status resemblance of brothers in the Netherlands during modernization. They test opposing hypotheses about how modernization processes influenced fraternal resemblance through the value and inequality of family resources based on a job competition model in combination with modernization theory, status maintenance theory, and dualism theory. The authors use the high-quality, large-scale database GENLIAS, yielding digitized information for approximately 450,000 linked Dutch marriage certificates from 250,000 families, complemented with historical indicators of six modernization processes for over 2,500 communities. Using multilevel meta-regression models, they find that brother correlations in status decreased slowly from about 1860 onward. Although this exactly parallels the period of modernization, the authors find that modernization processes were not responsible (except possibly urbanization and mass transportation). In fact, in line with dualism theory, fraternal resemblance increased with most processes (i.e., industrialization, educational expansion, in-migration, and mass communication) because they amplified inequality.

The modernization thesis claims that intergenerational social mobility increased over time due to... more The modernization thesis claims that intergenerational social mobility increased over time due to industrialization and other modernization processes. Here, we test whether this is indeed the case. We study approximately 360,000 brothers from 189,000 families covering more than 500 municipalities in the Netherlands and a 70-year period (1827 to 1897). We complement these sibling- and family-level data with municipal indicators for the degree of industrialization, mass communication, urbanization, educational expansion, geographic mobility, and mass transportation. We analyze these data by applying sibling models, that is, multilevel regression models where brothers are nested in families, which in turn are nested in communities. We find that the total—unmeasured—family effect on sons’ status attainment decreases slightly and is higher than that found for contemporary societies. The measured influence of the family, operationalized by father’s occupational status, decreased gradually in the Netherlands in the second half of the nineteenth century. A substantial part of this decrease was due to some, but not all, of the modernization processes adduced by the modernization thesis.

This study addresses the question what role social capital plays in the status attainment process... more This study addresses the question what role social capital plays in the status attainment process of men in the Netherlands in 2000: how important is social capital in the transfer of status from one generation to the next? We derive hypotheses by integrating the social resources theory in the classic status attainment model. To test these hypotheses we perform structural equation modeling on data from the Survey of the Social Networks of the Dutch (SSND). The most important result is that, although social capital is inherited and has a significant effect on one’s status, it plays a minor role in the intergenerational transmission of status. A reason is that the amount of social capital depends mostly on an individual’s educational level, and less so on family background. We further find that social capital actually needs to be activated in order to be of use and only about 30% of the men do so. Moreover, one benefits only from activating social capital if the mobilized person is of high status. Lastly, the role of the tie strength with the mobilized person is not as expected and deserves further attention together with others aspects of the network embeddedness of social capital.

Games, Jan 1, 2010

If actors want to reach a particular goal, they are often better off forming collaborative relati... more If actors want to reach a particular goal, they are often better off forming collaborative relations and investing together rather than investing separately. We study the coordination and cooperation problems that might hinder successful collaboration in a dynamic network setting. We develop an experiment in which coordination problems are mainly due to finding partners for collaboration, while cooperation problems arise at the investment levels of partners who have already agreed to collaborate. The results show that as costs of forming links increase, groups succeed less often in solving the coordination problem. Still, if subjects are able to solve the coordination problem, they invest in a suboptimal way in the network good. It is mostly found that if cooperation is successful in terms of investment, it is due to subjects being able to monitor how much their partners invest. Moreover, subjects deal better with the coordination and cooperation problems as they gain experience.

American Journal of Sociology, 2014

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

American Sociological Review, 2014

The modernization thesis claims that intergenerational social mobility increased over time due to... more The modernization thesis claims that intergenerational social mobility increased over time due to industrialization and other modernization processes. Here, we test whether this is indeed the case. We study approximately 360,000 brothers from 189,000 families covering more than 500 municipalities in the Netherlands and a 70-year period (1827 to 1897). We complement these sibling- and family-level data with municipal indicators for the degree of industrialization, mass communication, urbanization, educational expansion, geographic mobility, and mass transportation. We analyze these data by applying sibling models, that is, multilevel regression models where brothers are nested in families, which in turn are nested in communities. We find that the total—unmeasured—family effect on sons’ status attainment decreases slightly and is higher than that found for contemporary societies. The measured influence of the family, operationalized by father’s occupational status, decreased gradually...

npj science of learning, Mar 1, 2024

We study to what extent schools increase or decrease environmental and genetic influences on educ... more We study to what extent schools increase or decrease environmental and genetic influences on educational performance. Building on behavioral genetics literature on gene-environment interactions and sociological literature on the compensating and amplifying effects of schools on inequality, we investigate whether the role of genes and the shared environment is larger or smaller in higher-quality school environments. We apply twin models to Dutch administrative data on the educational performance of 18,384 same-sex and 11,050 opposite-sex twin pairs, enriched with data on the quality of primary schools. Our results show that school quality does not moderate genetic and shared-environmental influences on educational performance once the moderation by SES is considered. We find a gene-environment interplay for school SES: genetic variance decreases with increasing school SES. This school SES effect partly reflects parental SES influences. Yet, parental SES does not account for all the school SES moderation, suggesting that school-based processes play a role too.

Acta Politica

Whether educational attainment compensates for or reinforces family disadvantages in political pa... more Whether educational attainment compensates for or reinforces family disadvantages in political participation is currently a debated topic. Previous research has shown a consistent relationship between social origin and political participation in Western societies: individuals originating from low-socioeconomic-status families participate in politics less than those from high-socioeconomic-status families, which violates the democratic requirement of equality of political voice. In this paper, we investigate whether secondary education compensates for or reinforces the political inequality shaped by social origin. We used a German representative sample of 1012 identical twins aged 21–25 and applied family fixed effects regression models, which allowed us to control for measured and unmeasured social and genetic confounding. We found a positive effect of educational attainment on participation, which is most likely causal. Family disadvantage resulting from low parental education is c...

Education, occupation, and income have been long considered as powerful predictors of political p... more Education, occupation, and income have been long considered as powerful predictors of political participation in Western societies, indicating that voices of people with different socioeconomic status are not expressed to the same extent in politics. However, whether education, occupation, and income have causal effects on political participation is questionable; as well as whether education has an absolute or relative effect on political participation. We contribute to this discussion by estimating the effects of education, occupational status, and income on political participation on a sample of identical twins from Germany. By applying family fixed effects regression models, we take into account unmeasured confounding effects of the social environment and genes. We found that education has a positive effect on political participation that is most likely causal. We did not find effects of occupational status and income on political participation. We conclude that education is not ...

Previous research has shown a consistent effect of social origin on political participation: peop... more Previous research has shown a consistent effect of social origin on political participation: people originating from low-socioeconomic-status families participate in politics less than people from high-socioeconomic-status families, – which violates the democratic premise and one of the most fundamental human rights – equality of political voice. We investigated in this paper whether education compensates or reinforces the political inequality shaped by social origin. We used a German representative sample of 1,046 identical twins of 21-25 years old and applied family fixed effects regression models, which allowed to control for measured and unmeasured genetic and social confounding. We found a positive causal effect of educational attainment on participation. Family disadvantage caused by low parental education is compensated by children obtaining intermediate or high levels of education. At the same time, family advantage originating from high parental occupational status is reinf...

European Sociological Review

We investigate the influence of the classroom environment on educational performance and its depe... more We investigate the influence of the classroom environment on educational performance and its dependency on parental socio-economic status (SES). The classroom environment can have a compensatory effect and decrease educational inequality, in which case the classroom context is more important for children originating from lower SES families. Alternatively, there can be an amplifying effect, in which case the classroom environment is more important for high-SES children. This would increase educational inequality. We investigate the two alternatives by applying a twin design to data from 4,216 twin pairs from the Netherlands Twin Register (birth cohorts 1991–2002). Some twin pairs share a classroom and other twins from the same pair are in different classrooms. We use this fact to decompose the variance in educational performance at the end of primary school into four components: genetic variance, classroom variance, shared environmental variance, and non-shared environmental variance...

npj Science of Learning

There are concerns that ability tracking at a young age increases unequal opportunities for child... more There are concerns that ability tracking at a young age increases unequal opportunities for children of different socioeconomic background to develop their potential. To disentangle family influence and potential ability, we applied moderation models to twin data on secondary educational track level from the Netherlands Twin Register (N = 8847). Delaying tracking to a later age is associated with a lower shared environmental influence and a larger genetic influence on track level in adolescence. This is in line with the idea that delaying tracking improves equality of opportunity. Our results further suggest that this is mostly because delaying tracking reduces the indirect influence of family background on track level via the test performance of students. Importantly, delaying tracking improves the realization of genetic potential especially among students with low test scores, while it lowers shared environmental influence on track level for students of all test performance levels.

The History of the Family

Historical Life Course Studies

In this study we ask the question to what extent 19th-century university professors were a closed... more In this study we ask the question to what extent 19th-century university professors were a closed occupational group in the sense that they had little intergenerational and marriage mobility. We do so in honor of Kees Mandemakers, who is about to retire as a professor, but whose younger family members may follow in his footsteps. We derive competing hypotheses from cultural capital theory and the meritocracy thesis and test them using civil marriage records for the period 1813–1922 in six Dutch provinces (N = 1,180,976 marriages). Although only 4.4% of all university professors had a father in the same occupation, the odds ratio of 331 shows that this is much more likely than to be expected under independence. Similarly, professors were much more likely to marry the daughter of a professor. Compared to other elite occupations the intergenerational immobility of professors was not especially high, but their marriage immobility was exceptional. Cultural capital theory receives more su...

An old Dutch proverb says, “If you’re born a nickel, you’ll never become a dime,” meaning it is d... more An old Dutch proverb says, “If you’re born a nickel, you’ll never become a dime,” meaning it is difficult to escape the social class into which you are born. The fact that siblings often attain a similar occupational status shows that there is at least some truth in this. A classic sociological theory—modernization theory—claims that while family origin largely determined status attainment in traditional societies, modernization processes such as industrialization and educational expansion have increased the scope for social mobility. In the present study, Antonie Knigge has designed an original way to test whether this claim is true. He has used digitized information from Dutch marriage certificates from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This has allowed him to measure lack of social mobility not only with the conventional indicator, the similarity in occupational status between parents and children, but also with a more encompassing indicator, the similarity of occupatio...

European Sociological Review

While previous research has conclusively established that children with higher cognitive ability ... more While previous research has conclusively established that children with higher cognitive ability and those originating from advantaged socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds have better educational outcomes, the interplay between the influences of cognitive ability and social origin has been largely overlooked. The influence of cognitive ability might be weaker in high-SES families as a result of resource compensation, and stronger in high-SES families owing to resource multiplication. We investigate these mechanisms while taking into account the possibility that the association between cognitive ability and educational attainment might be partly spurious due to unobserved genetic and environmental influences. We do so by analysing a large sample of twins from the German TwinLife study (Npairs = 2,190). Our results show that the association between cognitive ability and educational attainment is to a large extent confounded by genetic and shared environmental factors. If this is not...

Studies on intergenerational social mobility usually examine the extent to which social positions... more Studies on intergenerational social mobility usually examine the extent to which social positions of one generation determine the social positions of the next. This study investigates whether the persistence of inequality can be expected to stretch over more than two generations. Using a multigenerational version of GENLIAS, a large-scale database containing information from digitized Dutch marriage certificates during 1812–1922, this study describes and explains the influence of grandfathers and great-grandfathers on the occupational status attainment of 119,662 men in the Netherlands during industrialization. Multilevel regression models show that both grandfather's and great-grandfather's status influence the status attainment of men, after fathers and uncles are taken into account. Whereas the influence of the father and uncles decreases over time, that of the grandfather and great-grandfather remains stable. The results further suggest that grandfathers influence their grandsons through contact but also without being in contact with them. Although the gain in terms of explained variance from using a multigenerational model is moderate, leaving out the influence of the extended family considerably misrepresents the influence of the family on status attainment.

Games, Jan 1, 2010

If actors want to reach a particular goal, they are often better off forming collaborative relati... more If actors want to reach a particular goal, they are often better off forming collaborative relations and investing together rather than investing separately. We study the coordination and cooperation problems that might hinder successful collaboration in a dynamic network setting. We develop an experiment in which coordination problems are mainly due to finding partners for collaboration, while cooperation problems arise at the investment levels of partners who have already agreed to collaborate. The results show that as costs of forming links increase, groups succeed less often in solving the coordination problem. Still, if subjects are able to solve the coordination problem, they invest in a suboptimal way in the network good. It is mostly found that if cooperation is successful in terms of investment, it is due to subjects being able to monitor how much their partners invest. Moreover, subjects deal better with the coordination and cooperation problems as they gain experience.

The authors describe and explain variation in the occupational status resemblance of brothers in ... more The authors describe and explain variation in the occupational status resemblance of brothers in the Netherlands during modernization. They test opposing hypotheses about how modernization processes influenced fraternal resemblance through the value and inequality of family resources based on a job competition model in combination with modernization theory, status maintenance theory, and dualism theory. The authors use the high-quality, large-scale database GENLIAS, yielding digitized information for approximately 450,000 linked Dutch marriage certificates from 250,000 families, complemented with historical indicators of six modernization processes for over 2,500 communities. Using multilevel meta-regression models, they find that brother correlations in status decreased slowly from about 1860 onward. Although this exactly parallels the period of modernization, the authors find that modernization processes were not responsible (except possibly urbanization and mass transportation). In fact, in line with dualism theory, fraternal resemblance increased with most processes (i.e., industrialization, educational expansion, in-migration, and mass communication) because they amplified inequality.

The modernization thesis claims that intergenerational social mobility increased over time due to... more The modernization thesis claims that intergenerational social mobility increased over time due to industrialization and other modernization processes. Here, we test whether this is indeed the case. We study approximately 360,000 brothers from 189,000 families covering more than 500 municipalities in the Netherlands and a 70-year period (1827 to 1897). We complement these sibling- and family-level data with municipal indicators for the degree of industrialization, mass communication, urbanization, educational expansion, geographic mobility, and mass transportation. We analyze these data by applying sibling models, that is, multilevel regression models where brothers are nested in families, which in turn are nested in communities. We find that the total—unmeasured—family effect on sons’ status attainment decreases slightly and is higher than that found for contemporary societies. The measured influence of the family, operationalized by father’s occupational status, decreased gradually in the Netherlands in the second half of the nineteenth century. A substantial part of this decrease was due to some, but not all, of the modernization processes adduced by the modernization thesis.

This study addresses the question what role social capital plays in the status attainment process... more This study addresses the question what role social capital plays in the status attainment process of men in the Netherlands in 2000: how important is social capital in the transfer of status from one generation to the next? We derive hypotheses by integrating the social resources theory in the classic status attainment model. To test these hypotheses we perform structural equation modeling on data from the Survey of the Social Networks of the Dutch (SSND). The most important result is that, although social capital is inherited and has a significant effect on one’s status, it plays a minor role in the intergenerational transmission of status. A reason is that the amount of social capital depends mostly on an individual’s educational level, and less so on family background. We further find that social capital actually needs to be activated in order to be of use and only about 30% of the men do so. Moreover, one benefits only from activating social capital if the mobilized person is of high status. Lastly, the role of the tie strength with the mobilized person is not as expected and deserves further attention together with others aspects of the network embeddedness of social capital.

Games, Jan 1, 2010

If actors want to reach a particular goal, they are often better off forming collaborative relati... more If actors want to reach a particular goal, they are often better off forming collaborative relations and investing together rather than investing separately. We study the coordination and cooperation problems that might hinder successful collaboration in a dynamic network setting. We develop an experiment in which coordination problems are mainly due to finding partners for collaboration, while cooperation problems arise at the investment levels of partners who have already agreed to collaborate. The results show that as costs of forming links increase, groups succeed less often in solving the coordination problem. Still, if subjects are able to solve the coordination problem, they invest in a suboptimal way in the network good. It is mostly found that if cooperation is successful in terms of investment, it is due to subjects being able to monitor how much their partners invest. Moreover, subjects deal better with the coordination and cooperation problems as they gain experience.