We develop and estimate a model of student study time on a social network. The model is designed to exploit unique data collected in the Berea Panel Study. Study time data allow us to quantify an intuitive mechanism for academic social interactions: own study time may depend on friend study time...

We describe a dynamic model of costly information sharing, where private information affecting collective-value actions is transmitted by social proximity. Individuals make voluntary contributions towards the provision of a pure public good, and information transmission about quality of...

Lifelong learning is often promoted in ageing societies, but little is known about its returns or governments’ ability to advance it. This paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale randomized field experiment issuing vouchers for adult education in Switzerland. We find no significant...

An influential body of psychological and anthropological theories holds that societies exhibit heterogeneous cooperation systems that differ both in their level of in-group favoritism and in the tools that they employ to enforce cooperative behavior. According to some of these theories, entire...

Using longitudinal data based on administrative registers for the population of Danish men we develop a model which accounts for the joint earnings dynamics of siblings and youth community peers. We are the first to decompose the sibling correlation of permanent earnings into family and...

Inequality of opportunity, particularly when overlaid with racial, ethnic, or cultural differences, increases the social distance between individuals, which is widely believed to limit the scope of cooperation. A central question, then, is how to bridge such divides. We study the effects of a...

Traditional economic models of vaccination behavior simply assume that agents free-ride on the vaccination decisions of others. We provide three different models of private provision of a public good, such as a joint production model and a conjectural variation model, to explain how a positive...

Using a theoretical model where students care about achievement rank, I study effort choices in the classroom and show that rank concerns generate peer effects. The model's key empirical prediction is that the effect on own achievement of increasing the dispersion in peer cost of effort is...

Productivity varies greatly among farmers and the source of that variation is not fully understood. Using a unique Indian household survey, we estimate peer effects on agricultural revenue. Results show that 60% of farmers' revenue is explained by peers. Input expenditures and land allocation to...

We study charitable giving within social groups. Exploiting a unique dataset, we establish three key relationships between social group size and fundraising outcomes: (i) a positive relationship between group size and the total number of donations; (ii) a negative relationship between group size...