The aim of this paper is to provide a new mechanism based on social interactions explaining why minority workers have worse labor-market outcomes than majority workers. Building on Granovetter's idea that weak ties are superior to strong ties for providing support in getting a job, we develop a...

We develop a dynamic model of identity formation that explains why ethnic minorities may choose to adopt oppositional identities (i.e. some individuals may reject or not the dominant culture) and why this behavior may persist over time. We first show that the prevalence of an oppositional...

Unlike economies as a whole, manufacturing industries exhibit unconditional convergence in labor productivity. The paper documents this finding for 4-digit manufacturing sectors for a large group of developed and developing countries over the period since 1990. The coefficient of unconditional...

We develop two different social network models with different economic foundations. In the local-aggregate model, it is the sum of friends' efforts in some activity that affects the utility of each individual while, in the local-average model, it is costly to deviate from the average effort of...

Delinquents are embedded in a network of relationships. Social ties among delinquents are modelled by means of a graph where delinquents compete for a booty and benefit from local interactions with their neighbors. Each delinquent decides in a non-cooperative way how much delinquency effort he...

Data show that better creditor protection is correlated across countries with lower average stock market volatility. Moreover, countries with better creditor protection are observed to have suffered lower decline in their stock market indexes during the current financial crisis. To explain this...

This paper studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex-ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and deterrence affect criminal activities. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed...

We analyze a model of network formation with agents that belong to different communities and an endogenous cost structure. Both individual benefits and costs depend on direct as well as indirect connections. Benefits of an indirect connection decrease with distance in the network, while the cost...

Workers can have good or bad work habits. These traits are transmitted from one generation to the next through a learning and imitation process which depends on parents' investment on the trait and the social environment where children live. We show that, if a high enough proportion of employers...

In this survey, we focus on key mechanisms through which liquidity and financial shocks affect major types of capital flows. We focus on a few models that examine the role of asymmetric information, liquidity preferences, limited enforcement, and incomplete markets on the composition of capital...