A person's schooling years are a formative time for cognitive development, and also a period of intense social interaction and friendship formation. In this paper, we estimate the production of social capital during adolescence and its effect on wages. We develop a model where homophily and...

Despite their importance to the supply of prescription drugs, there has been limited research on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and their vertical relationships to insurers and drug manufacturers. This paper provides an overview of the current state of research on this topic, motivates why...

Motivated by evidence on the importance of incomplete information and networks in international trade, we investigate the supply of 'network intermediation.' We hypothesize that the agents who become international trade intermediaries first accumulate networks of foreign contacts while working...

How do geographic and historical-cultural factors shape new business formation? Using novel data on new business registrations, we document that 75% of the variation in new business formation is explained by time-invariant county-level factors and examine the extent to which such variation is...

Societies socialize children about sex. This is done in the presence of peer-group effects, which may encourage undesirable behavior. Parents want the best for their children. Still, they weigh the marginal gains from socializing their children against its costs. Churches and states may...

Using newly validated data on geographic migration networks, we study how labor demand shocks in the United States propagate across the border with Mexico. We show that the large exogenous decline in US employment brought about by the Great Recession affected demographic and economic outcomes in...

We document the transmission of social distancing practices from the United States to Mexico along migrant networks during the early 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Using data on pre-existing migrant connections between Mexican and U.S. locations and mobile-phone tracking data revealing social...

In this paper, we propose a new approach to the estimation of social networks and we apply it to the estimation of productivity spillovers in the U.S. Congress. Social networks such as the social connections among lawmakers are not generally directly observed, they can be recovered only using...

We study the relationship between Hispanic employment and location-specific measures of the distribution of jobs. We find that it is only the local density of jobs held by Hispanics that matters for Hispanic employment, that measures of local job density defined for Hispanic poor English...

Sociologists have shown that "third places" such as neighborhood cafés help people maintain and use their network ties. Do they help local entrepreneurs, for whom networks are important? We examine whether the introduction of Starbucks cafés into U.S. neighborhoods with no coffee shops...