We consider a model of international migration where skills of workers are imperfectly observed by firms in the host country and where information asymmetries are more severe for immigrants than for natives. There are two stages. In the first one, workers in the South decide whether to move and...

The centrality of an agent in a network has been shown to be crucial in explaining different behaviors and outcomes. In this paper, we propose an axiomatic approach to characterize a class of centrality measures for which the centrality of an agent is recursively related to the centralities of...

Destination countries have been resorting to selective immigration policies to improve migrants' quality. We propose a model that analyzes the effects of selective immigration policies on migrants' quality, measured by their wages at destination. Screening potential migrants on the basis of...

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...

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...

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...