In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the network of Islamic banking and finance (IBF) came under scrutiny from the FBI, the Department of the Treasury, and other U.S. government agencies that sought to freeze any financial transactions that might be linked to global terrorism. Despite this scrutiny, the IBF continues to provide an essential financial network to many devout Muslims, many of whom turn to the IBF to help finance home ownership, college loans, automobile loans, and interest-free business loans.

Since 1997, three waves of the New York Social Indicators Survey (NYSIS) have garnered information from New Yorkers about their health, happiness, financial status, living conditions, participation in government programs, and more. Since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center changed the physical and emotional landscape of the city, interest in the well-being of New Yorkers has climbed.

Supplemental Appropriation: May 2004 $4,000

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Arabs and Muslims living in the United States have had to face increased scrutiny from public officials and escalated violence in the form of hate crimes. Has this "backlash" against Arabs and Muslims also been felt in the economic sphere?

After the terror attacks of September 11, the Foundation invited a number of economists, sociologists, and political scientists to analyze the effects of the attacks on the city’s social, economic, and political life. The working group subsequently produced three volumes, including, Contentious City: The Politics of Recovery in New York City. In that volume, urban planning expert Lynn Sagalyn contributed an essay on the emotionally charged planning process for redevelopment of the World Trade Center site between 2001 and 2004.

Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, organized a conference on April 2, 2009, at the Barbara Jordan Conference Center at the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington, D.C., to discuss the future of social policies affecting women in the wake of a new national administration. Four main topics were covered, with three panelists to discuss each topic. The first topic considered women in the economic recovery, including how to strengthen the economy by rebuilding the nation’s physical and human infrastructure.

An ethnographic study of the development of trusting relations between traders and producers in the vanilla market of Madagascar.

Case studies of four union leaders to explore the role that democratic rules and procedures play in affecting trust, trustworthiness, and good representation in relationships between union leaders and their constituents.

The decision to extend credit to a borrower is fundamentally about trust. In credit markets, firms like Dun and Bradstreet help lenders determine who is trustworthy and who is not by examining the past behavior of potential borrowers. By instilling bankers with a sense of trust in borrowers whom they did not know personally, credit raters conceivably expand access to lending. But how true is the old adage that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior? Are credit ratings accurate predictors of loan default?

Principal-agency theory assumes that incentives are necessary to motivate the agent (employee) to act in the best interests of the principal (employer). Yet preliminary studies by Andrew Whitford of the University of Kansas revealed a different outcome: principals paid agents for effort without being able to monitor their performance, and the agents supplied. Whitford and his colleagues William Bottom and Gary Miller of Washington University hypothesize that principal-agency theory will not hold true when trust enters the equation.

Economic theory views the rates of technological development and diffusion as the prime engines of growth. But creating new technologies is not enough: they must be accepted by users in the economy. Adopting a new technology often requires trust that a new product is an actual improvement over what was available in the past. High-trust economies may enjoy a competitive advantage if new products diffuse more quickly and at lower cost.