Abstract

A growing body of literature has started to study the impact of social capital on local development, according to Putnam's(1993) hypothesis. In this paper I focus on Italian provinces and try to relate the diffusion of social cooperatives to value added per capita. To tackle the issue of endogeneity I relied on the amoral familism theory proposed by Banfield. Hence the presence of cooperatives is instrumented by using the prevalence of family types in the Fifties. I found support to the research hypothesis, although empirical evidence on Center-Northern provinces is weak.