Social capital dimensions and subjective wellbeing: A quantile approach

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of the different dimensions of social capital (i.e., trust, social network and civic engagement-including norms) on subjective well-being (SWB) at the individual level by attending to differences between the extremes of SWB distribution, this is between the happiest and unhappiest people. To this end, we use the 7 th wave of the 2014 European Social Survey (ESS) to run a quantile regression analysis to investigate whether any of these dimensions of social capital has a heterogeneous effect on the full distribution of well-being. We also perform a factor analysis to summarize the principal components of these three dimensions. Our results show that each dimension of social capital has a positive and significant correlation with SWB, but the different dimensions have a heterogeneous effect on the different quantiles of the wellbeing distribution. All of these dimensions of social capital have a stronger effect on the SWB of the least happy people in society than on the happiest.