Economists draw important lessons for modern development from the medieval Maghribi traders who, according to Greif, enforced contracts multilaterally through a closed, private-order coalition'. We show that this view is untenable. The Maghribis used formal legal mechanisms and entered business...

We use anonymized and aggregated data from Facebook to show that areas with stronger social ties to two early COVID-19 "hotspots" (Westchester County, NY, in the U.S. and Lodi province in Italy) generally have more confirmed COVID-19 cases as of March 30, 2020. These relationships hold after...

The offshoring of production by multinational firms has expanded dramatically in recent decades, increasing these firms’ potential for economic growth and technological transfers across countries. What determines the location of offshore production? How do countries' policies and...

This paper investigates whether the rare occurrence of a local election ending in a tie or being decided by a single vote generates informational spill-overs on nearby localities' subsequent elections. First, based on the pivotal-voter theory, we develop a model of costly instrumental voting in...

We model network formation in a firm. Agents learn about the quality of their working relationships with each other. Their good relationships become their networks. Accumulating relationships becomes increasingly costly, however. Over time agents become less open to forming relationships with...

We investigate the relationship between social capital and the decision to flee after a fatal road accident. This event is unplanned, and the decision is taken under great emotional distress and time pressure, thus providing a test of whether social capital matters for behaviour in extreme...

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the study of international trade that leads to a measure of country openness that is quite different from the various alternatives proposed by the received literature. In contrast to these, our measure does not use indicators of aggregate trade...

How does immigration affect export performance? To answer this question we propose a unified empirical framework allowing to disentangle various mechanisms such as the role of networks in reducing bilateral transaction costs as well as productivity shifts arising from migration-induced knowledge...