A person's schooling years are a formative time for cognitive development, and also a period of intense social interaction and friendship formation. In this paper, we estimate the production of social capital during adolescence and its effect on wages. We develop a model where homophily and...

This paper uses data from global and Canadian surveys data to estimate the powerful linkages between social connections, their related social identities, and subjective well-being. Our explanatory variables include several measures of the extent and frequency of use of social networks, combined...

We explore the links between social capital and labor market networks at the neighborhood level. We harness rich data taken from multiple sources, including matched employer-employee data with which we measure the strength of labor market networks, data on behavior such as voting patterns that...

Using friendship data from Facebook, we study the effects of three aspects of social capital on household financial behavior. We find that the most important measure of social capital in explaining stock market and saving participation is Economic Connectedness, defined as the fraction of one's...

We examine how two highly successful new biotechnology firms (NBFs) source their most critical input -- scientific knowledge. We find that scientists at the two NBFs enter into large numbers of collaborative research efforts with scientists at other organizations, especially universities. Formal...

What motivated men to risk death in the most horrific war in U.S. history when pay was low and irregular and military punishment strategies were weak? In such a situation creating group loyalty by promoting social capital is of paramount importance and in the Civil War was the cement of both...

In this paper--the first in a series of two papers that use data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook to study social capital--we measure and analyze three types of social capital by ZIP code in the United States: (i) connectedness between different types of people, such as those with low vs....

Low levels of social interaction across class lines have generated widespread concern and are associated with worse outcomes, such as lower rates of upward income mobility. Here, we analyze the determinants of cross-class interaction using data from Facebook, building upon the analysis in the...

Pharmaceutical companies' marketing efforts primarily target physicians, often through individual detailing that entails monetary or in-kind transfers. We study how peer influence broadens these payments' reach beyond the directly paid physicians. Combining Medicare prescriptions and Open...

We consider multi-agent multi-firm contracting when agents benchmark their wages to a weighted average of their peers, where weights may vary within and across firms. Despite common shocks, compensation benchmarking can undo performance benchmarking, so that wages load positively rather than...