Responses to surveys eliciting evaluations of trust in government, both generally and in specific areas, have varied over time and across countries.Using consistent survey data for 34 OECD countries from 2007-2023, we estimate a model of factors determining levels of trust.We employ a series of econometric techniques of increasing sophistication.The level and growth rate of real income per capita, social spending per capita, the degree of decentralization, and economic freedom all exert positive effects on trust.Inflation, unemployment, and debt per capita negatively affect trust.Additionally, higher levels of human capital and the elderly share of the population negatively affect trust.In the context of trust in government, the estimates suggest a heavier weight on inflation than on unemployment when compared to Okun's misery index, which weights them equally.Additionally, the estimates are used to evaluate combinations of policies, e.g.debt-financed increases in social spending that affect inflation and/or unemployment, to determine the net effect on trust in government.
Web3 and DeFi are widely advocated as innovations for greater financial inclusion and democratization. We assemble the most comprehensive dataset to date on the largest Web3 ecosystem and use large-scale computing to investigate the claim. We discuss Ethereum's network structure, time trends, and distributions of transactions, mining, and ownership. Mining income and Ether ownership are concentrated in a few nodes, even after excluding exchange and mining pool wallets, with inequalities more exacerbated than observed in the real economy. Network activities are dominated by large transactions, shifting from peer-to-peer to user-DApps/DeFi interactions, and from Ether-based to ERC-20-token-based. High percentage transaction fees, congestion-induced gas-price fluctuation, suboptimal reserve setting, and large return volatility of tokens disproportionally harm small, unsophisticated, and new nodes, with high failure rates hurting all users. Finally, we present causal evidence that base-fee burning mechanisms (e.g., EIP-1559) and airdrop programs (e.g., OmiseGo Airdrop) promote inclusion and equality through monetary redistribution.
The decentralization of school governanceâoften blended with market dynamicsâhas become a prominent strategy for lifting the performance of urban schools. This approach rests upon several assumptions, primarily that freedom from bureaucratic regulation will strengthen teacher community and result in more effective allocation of instructional resources. But do small autonomous high schools host such favorable social-organizational features? What drives collaborative relationships among teachers in decentralized schools? And do these relations help to account for between-school and between-teacher variation in teacher trust and shared responsibility for student learning? To examine these core questions I draw on social network theory as a theoretical frame and build from the literature on the social organization of efficacious schools. Survey data were collected from 392 teachers in 20 small site-managed charter and pilot high schools located in Los Angeles. First, I used p2 network modeling to determine the extent to which a teacherâs position in the school organization and personal characteristics predicted their instructional support relationships. Second, to examine the influence of these instructional support relationships on a teacherâs perceptions of normative culture in their schools, I estimated hierarchical linear models (HLM) estimating collective responsibility and relational trust as functions of teacher position in the school organization, teacher personal characteristics, and teacher- and school-level network measures of the instructional support relationships.Teachersâ choice of colleagues to whom they turn for support to improve their teaching practice reflected not only leadersâ efforts to shape teacher collaboration, but also preferences for forming ties with a colleague based on their personal characteristics. Teachers were more likely to seek advice to improve their teaching practice from colleagues who taught the same subject. However, teachers were less likely to seek advice from the more experienced teachers in the school. The likelihood of an instructional advice relationship was greater when teachers were of the same race. Teachersâ perceptions of normative culture were influenced by the distribution of these social resources in the school, in that uneven distribution of advice and support relationships was detrimental for a sense of shared responsibility for student learning but conducive to a high level of trust in the group. For individual teachers, their collaborative activity conditioned the perceptions further: those teachers most often approached for support by colleagues held weaker perceptions of the groupâs overall shared responsibility. This approach advances the study of teacher professional community to incorporate the âdyadâ as a focus, honing in on an essential building block of cohesive social organizations. The study also demonstrates meaningful variation among teachers within the same school in how they perceive normative culture. The findings contribute to the literature on teacher professional community and have implications for policymakers, districts and school leaders.