We examine how participation in a microfinance program diffuses through social networks. We collected detailed demographic and social network data in 43 villages in South India before microfinance was introduced in those villages and then tracked eventual participation. We exploit exogenous...

Social networks are an important channel of information transmission in the labor market. This paper studies the mechanisms by which social networks have an impact on labor market outcomes of displaced workers. We base our analysis on administrative records for the universe of private sector...

We examine the returns from owning cows and buffaloes in rural India. We estimate that when valuing labor at market wages, households earn large, negative average returns from holding cows and buffaloes, at negative 64% and negative 39% respectively. This puzzle is mostly explained if we value...

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...

Finite population non-cooperative games with linear-quadratic utilities, where each player decides how much action she exerts, can be interpreted as a network game with local payoff complementarities, together with a globally uniform payoff substitutability component and an own concavity effect....

We survey the literatures on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks. We develop a taxonomy of 'macro' and 'micro' characteristics of social inter-action networks and discuss both the theoretical and empirical findings concerning the role of those characteristics in...

We examine a randomized trial that allows separate identification of peer screening and enforcement of credit contracts. A South African microlender offered half its clients a bonus for referring a friend who repaid a loan. For the remaining clients, the bonus was conditional on loan approval....

Despite their potentially strong impact on poverty, agricultural innovations are often adopted slowly. Using a unique household dataset on sunflower adoption in Mozambique, we analyse whether and how individual adoption decisions depend upon the choices of others in the same social networks....

In this paper we test the implications of a model of network formation on data from rural Ethiopia. In contrast to the current literature, we demonstrate the critical role of both number of links and architecture in determining the impact of social networks on outcomes. Social capital matters,...

In this paper the two standard forms of international investment in developing countries – debt and foreign direct investment (FDI) – are compared from a finance perspective. We show that the sovereign risks associated with debt finance are generally less severe than those accompanying FDI....