Social Capital and Health: Setting the Stage for the Next Steps

In the last twenty years a new stream of research emerged at the intersection between public health, epidemiology and health economics, with the purpose of studying the relationship between social capital and individual health. The number of published papers, surveys and books dealing with this subject increased exponentially. Despite, there are a few debated issues yet to be settled, including the very definition of social capital, its boundaries and, consequently, its measurement. Identification of causal effects progressed over time. In this talk I briefly mention three attempts to uncover causal effects. In…