Co-ethnic employment refers to the stylised fact of many labour markets that there is an over-representation of workers of the same ethnic group within firms. This paper presents empirical proof of the phenomenon and analyses the incentives for employees to work in co-ethnic firms. It argues...

In this paper we test the celebrated `Strength of weak ties' theory of Granovetter (1973). We test two hypotheses on the network structure in a data set of collaborating economists. While we find support for the hypothesis of transitivity of strong ties, we reject the hypothesis that weak ties...

One of the main issues in economics is the trade-off between marginalism and egalitarianism. In the context of cooperative games this trade-off can be framed as one of choosing to allocate according to the Shapley value or the equal division solution. In this paper we provide tools that make it...

We consider a hierarchical organization with two fully rational agents. The goal of the organization is that of selecting the best alternative out of several available, and agents are heterogenous in the accuracy with which they screen the alternatives. We show that, if internal communications...

This is an experimental study of a three-player power-to-take game where a take authority is matched with two responders. The game consists of two stages. In the first stage, the take authority decides how much of the endowment of each responder that is left after the second stage will be...

In this paper we consider the problem of the control of access to a firm's productive asset, embedding the relevant decision makers into a general structure of formal authority relations. Within such an authority structure, each decision maker acts as a principal to some decision makers, while...

A symmetric network consists of a set of positions and a set of bilateral links between these positions. Examples of such networks are exchange networks, communication networks, disease transmission networks, control networks etc. For every symmetric network we define a cooperative transferable...

Transaction costs are a major reason why international trade flows are much smaller than traditional trade theory would suggest. Trust between trading partners lowers transaction costs and may therefore enhance trade. The empirical analysis of this paper shows that more trust leads to more trade...

There is a small but growing literature on the determinants of social capital. Most of these studies use a measure of trust to define social capital empirically. In this paper we use three different measures of social capital: the size of the individual’s social network, the extent of their...

We analyze the impact of adolescents' friendship relations in their final-year class of high school on subsequent labor market success. Based on a typology of network positions we locate each student within the social system of the school class as either: an <I>isolate</I>, a <I>sycophant</I>, a <I>broker</I> or a...</i></i></i></i>