Bank foundations, social capital and the growth of Italian provinces

The funding role of bank foundations in the Italian economy, especially to the non-profit sector, significantly increased over the last 25 years. This paper constructs a novel measure of social capital at the provincial level that explicitly takes into account the bank foundations’ sectors of intervention (such as education, public health, and art and culture), together with other traditional aspects of social capital, and then tests the impact of bank foundations on the economic growth of Italian provinces. The findings suggest that the contribution of bank foundations to social capital positively affects the economic growth of provinces.