In this paper, we estimate the influence of social relationships on educational attainment and social outcomes of students in school. More specifically, we investigate how losing different types of social relationships during the transition from elementary to middle school affect students'...

We develop a model of informal risk-sharing in social networks, where relationships between individuals can be used as social collateral to enforce insurance payments. We characterize incentive compatible risk-sharing arrangements and obtain two results. (1) The degree of informal insurance is...

Social network data is often prohibitively expensive to collect, limiting empirical network research. Typical economic network mapping requires (1) enumerating a census, (2) eliciting the names of all network links for each individual, (3) matching the list of social connections to the census,...

This paper considers a modification of the standard Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model of epidemic that allows for different degrees of compulsory as well as voluntary social distancing. It is shown that the fraction of population that self-isolates varies with the perceived probability...