Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility
Using data on 21 billion Facebook friendships, the authors construct ZIP-code-level measures of three distinct forms of social capital: cross-class connectedness, social cohesion, and civic engagement. They show these measures vary widely across areas and are only weakly correlated with one another. They find that economic connectedness between low- and high-income people is strongly associated with upward income mobility, more so than other forms of social capital.