Structural social capital and health in Italy

•We perform the first assessment of the relationship between SC and health in Italy.•Individuals who meet friends frequently are 16% more likely to report good health.•Unemployed workers have a 3% higher probability to report poor health.

This paper presents the first empirical assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and health in Italy. The analysis draws on the 2000 wave of the Multipurpose Survey on Household conducted by the Italian Institute of Statistics on a representative sample of the population (n = 46,868). Our measure of social capital is the frequency of meetings with friends. Based on IV and bivariate probit estimates, we find that individuals who meet friends every day or more time times a week are approximately 11-16% more likely to report good health.