This Paper studies kinship-band networks as capital market institutions. It explores two of the channels through which membership in a community where individuals are genealogically linked, such as a kin group, can affect their access to informal credit. The first is that incentives to default...

Product development within and across community-based and geographically dispersed virtual organizations is becoming an increasingly important mechanism through which individual knowledge holders create and disseminate knowledge in joint efforts to generate products. Without the benefits of...

It has been widely documented that the poor spend a significant proportion of their income on gifts even at the expense of basic consumption. We test three competing explanations of this phenomenon--peer effect, status concern, and risk pooling--based on a census-type primary household survey in...

In our model, workers are embedded within a network of social relationships and can communicate through word-of-mouth. They can find a job either through formal agencies or through informal networks of contacts (word-of-mouth communication). From this micro scenario, we derive an aggregate...

This paper investigates how a mandatory activation program in Denmark affects the job finding rate of unemployed workers. The activation program was introduced in an experimental setting where about half of the workers who became unemployed in the period from November 2005 to March 2006 were...