Formal financial institutions can have far-reaching and long-lasting impacts on informal lending and information networks. We first study 75 villages in Karnataka, 43 of which were exposed to microfinance after we first collected detailed network data. Networks shrink more in exposed villages....

A housing lottery in an Indian city provided winning slum dwellers the opportunity to move into improved housing on the city's periphery. Fourteen years later, relative to lottery losers, winners report improved housing farther from the city center, but no change in family income or human...

Can we identify the members of a community who are best- placed to diffuse information simply by asking a random sample of individuals? We show that boundedly-rational individuals can, simply by tracking sources of gossip, identify those who are most central in a network according to "diffusion...

We define a general class of network formation models, Statistical Exponential Random Graph Models (SERGMs), that nest standard exponential random graph models (ERGMs) as a special case. We provide the first general results on when these models' (including ERGMs) parameters estimated from the...

Absence of well-functioning formal institutions leads to reliance on social networks to enforce informal contracts. Social ties may aid cooperation, but agents vary in network centrality, and this hierarchy may hinder cooperation. To assess the extent to which networks substitute for...

This research examines the determinants of entrepreneurship in the initial transition from agriculture to industrial production and the subsequent transition to higher value exporting in China. Using data covering the universe of registered firms over the 1994-2009 period, we find that...

How should industrial policies be directed to reduce distortions and foster economic development? We study this question in a multi-sector model with technology adoption, where the production of goods and modern technologies features rich network structures. We provide simple formulas for the...