Trust and trustworthiness after a land restitution program: lab-in-the-field evidence from Colombia

We assess the impact on trust and trustworthiness of a governmental program to compensate victims of forced displacement. All our subjects were eligible to apply for restitution of their land in accordance with the 2011 “Bill of Victims” issued by the Colombian government. The key independent variable of our analysis is whether a subject had obtained land within this or similar programs. Our dependent variables are a subject’s trust and trustworthiness to unknown others, as measured by an experimental Trust Game. We focus on interpersonal trust and trustworthiness because of their well-documented positive efect on economic development. Our design also included a treatment in which subjects voted on their most preferred outcomes in the game, as it has been shown that consultative democracy can increase mutual trust in other settings. We fnd that land restitution is signifcantly correlated with higher trustworthiness, while there is no correlation with trust. This is consistent with the idea that trust and t