We develop a model in which ethnic minorities can either assimilate to the majority's norm or reject it by trading off higher productivity and wages with a greater social distance to their culture of origin. We show that "oppositional" ethnic minorities reside in more segregated areas, have...

We propose a spatial search-matching model where both job creation and job destruction are endogenous. Workers are ex ante identical but not ex post since their job can be hit by a technological shock, which decreases their productivity. They reside in a city and commuting to the job center...

We develop a model where information about jobs is essentially obtained through friends and relatives, i.e. strong and weak ties. Workers commute to a business center to work and to interact with other people. We find that housing prices increase with the level of social interactions in the city...

We develop a theoretical model in which technology adoption decisions are based on the information received from others about the quality of a new technology and on their risk attitudes. We test the predictions of this model using a randomized field experiment in Bangladesh. We show that the...

In this paper, we ask under what conditions norms can enhance welfare by mitigating moral hazard in income insurance. We point out a particular role of norms, namely to compensate for insurers' difficulties in monitoring the behavior of insured individuals. Thus, the functioning of social norms...

We analyze investment decisions when information is costly, with and without delegation to an agent. We use a rational-inattention model and compare it with a canonical signal-extraction model. We identify three "investment conditions". In "sour" conditions, no information is acquired and no...

We develop a simple yet realistic model of income insurance, where the individual’s ability and willingness to work is treated as a continuous variable. In this framework, income insurance not only provides income smoothing, it also relieves the individual from particularly burdensome work. As...

In this paper we treat an individual’s health as a continuous variable, in contrast to the traditional literature on income insurance, where it is regularly treated as a binary variable. This is not a minor technical matter; in fact, a continuous treatment of an individual’s health sheds new...

We survey the literature on social networks by putting together the economics, sociological and physics/applied mathematics approaches, showing their similarities and differences. We expose, in particular, the two main ways of modeling network formation. While the physics/applied mathematics...

We survey the literature on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks. We develop a taxonomy of "macro" and "micro" characteristics of social interaction networks and discuss both the theoretical and empirical findings concerning the role of those characteristics in...