We provide some of the first rigorous evidence on performance spillovers and social network in the workplace. The data we use are rather extraordinary - weekly data for rejection rates (proportion of defective output) for all weavers in a firm during a 12 months (April 2003-March 2004) period,...

This paper investigates in a principal-agent environment whether and how group membership influences the effectiveness of incentives and when incentives can have hidden costs, i.e., a detrimental effect. We show experimentally that in all interactions control mechanisms can have hidden costs for...

Bloggers devote significant time not only producing content for others to read, watch or listen to, but also paying attention to and engaging in interactions with other bloggers. We hope to throw light not only on the factors that gain bloggers significant readership and lively interactions with...

Outward migration data from the Philippines exhibit spatial clustering. This is likely due to information spillover effects - fellow migrants share information with other neighboring migrants, thereby lowering the costs of migration. To verify this, we use spatial econometrics to define a...

Seasonal migration is an ever more important phenomenon worldwide, but has received little attention in empirical research. This paper investigates the choice of seasonal versus longer-term migration on a household level. We use data from Moldova, a country that is witnessing a massive...

Workers are embedded within a network of social relationships and can communicate through word-of-mouth. They can find a job either directly or through personal contacts. From this micro scenario, we derive an aggregate matching function that has the standard properties but fails to be...

Economists draw important lessons for modern development from the medieval Maghribi traders who, according to Greif, enforced contracts multilaterally through a closed, private-order coalition'. We show that this view is untenable. The Maghribis used formal legal mechanisms and entered business...

We study the mapping between labor mobility and industrial innovative activity for the population of R&D active Danish firms observed between 1999 and 2004. Our study documents a positive relationship between the number of workers who join a firm and the firm's innovative activity. This...

Social interactions determine many economic behaviors, but information on social ties does not exist in most publicly available and widely used datasets. We present results on the identification of social networks from observational panel data that contains no information on social ties between...