Merchant guilds have been portrayed as social networks that generated beneficial social capital by sustaining shared norms, effectively transmitting information, and successfully undertaking collective action. This social capital, it is claimed, benefited society as a whole by enabling rulers to...

This paper analyzes an early modern German economy to test alternative theories about guilds. It finds little evidence to support recent hypotheses arguing that guilds corrected market failures relating to product quality, training, and innovation. But it finds that guilds were social networks...

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...

Does social media or offline social cohesion overcome collective action problems more effectively when both types of networks are prevalent? We investigate non-violent protests against a place-based economic reform in Austria - a country where one in two citizens uses Facebook but also one in...

We examine the long-run effect of homophily in online social networks on interpersonal interactions in local communities. We measure online homophily across counties in the US using Facebook data. For identification, we exploit a conflict between Facebook and Google over data sharing of user...

Economic societies emerged during the late eighteenth-century. We argue that these institutions reduced the costs of accessing useful knowledge by adopting, producing, and diffusing new ideas. Combining location information for the universe of 3,300 members across active economic societies in...

The last decade has seen a growing interest among economists on the effect of diversity on the provision of social goods and the stock of social capital. Indeed, in the workplace, cooperation, trust, and other social goods may be important elements of the smooth functioning of an office, but...

We show that professional soccer players exhibit reference-dependent behavior during matches. Controlling for the state of the match and for unobserved heterogeneity, we show on a minute-by-minute basis that a player breaches the rules of the game, measured by the referee's assignment of cards,...