Volunteering is a dominant social force that signals a healthy state. However, although the literature on volunteering is extensive, knowledge on how life’s discontinuities (life event shocks) affect volunteering is limited because most studies work with static (cross-sectional) data. To...

We analyze delinquent networks of adolescents in the United States. We develop a dynamic network formation model showing who the key player is, i.e. the criminal who once removed generates the highest possible reduction in aggregate crime level. We then structurally estimate our model using data...

We study a dynamic model of opinion formation in social networks. In our model, boundedly rational agents update opinions by averaging over their neighbors' expressed opinions, but may misrepresent their own opinion by conforming or counter-conforming with their neighbors. We show that an...

We investigate the role of manipulation in a model of opinion formation. Agents repeatedly communicate with their neighbors in the social network, can exert effort to manipulate the trust of others, and update their opinions about some common issue by taking weighted averages of neighbors'...

We study the broken windows theory with a field experiment in a shared area of a workplace in academia (department common room). We explore academics’ and postgraduate students’ behaviour under an order condition (clean environment) and a disorder condition (messy environment). We find...

We develop a dynamic model to analyze the sources and the evolution of social participation and social capital in a growing economy characterized by exogenous technical progress. Starting from the assumption that the well-being of agents basically depends on material and relational goods, we...

Why do parties offer environmental policies in their political programs? While a number of papers examine the determinants of citizens’ pro-environmental behaviour, we know little about the extent to which political parties adjust their platform towards environmentalism. We investigate this...

We develop a social network model of occupational segregation between different social groups, generated by the existence of positive inbreeding bias among individuals from the same group. If network referrals are important for job search, then expected homophily in the contact network structure...

This paper addresses two hot topics of the contemporary debate, social capital and economic growth. Our theoretical analysis sheds light on decisive but so far neglected issues: how does social capital accumulate over time? Which is the relationship between social capital, technical progress and...

Which kind of social capital fosters the diffusion of development-oriented trust? This paper carries out an empirical investigation into the causal relationships connecting four types of social capital (i.e. bonding, bridging, linking, and corporate), and different forms of trust...