Previous research on firm performance does not adequately account for the interrelatedness of a firm's professional connections, political ties, and family business-group affiliation. Many widely-cited findings may therefore be subject to confounding bias. To address this problem, we adopt a...

Purpose: This paper addresses the nature, formalization, and neural bases of (affective) social ties anddiscusses the relevance of ties for health economics. A social tie is defined as an affectiveweight attached by an individual to the well-being of another individual...

This paper evaluates the strength of social and economic forces that affect the pressure to emigrate 'out of Africa' for four distinctly different African countries (Morocco, Egypt, Senegal and Ghana). In general, great expectations about attaining a higher living standard and expected low job...

I study a one-way flow connections model in which players are heterogeneous with respect to values and the costs of establishing a link. I first show that values and costs asymmetries are crucial in determining the level of connectedness of a network. Interestingly, unconnected equilibria are...

It is widely recognized that the shape of networks influences both individual and aggregate behavior. This raises the question which types of networks are likely to arise. Our paper fits into the literature that addresses this question. The paper continues on the work of Galeotti, Goyal and...

A fundamental question in social sciences is how trust emerges. We provide an answer which relies on the formation of social and economic relationships. We argue that behind trust lies the fact that individuals invest in connections taking into account the potential externalities networks...

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...