This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the effect of sociability on the age of marriage. Theoretically, a more sociable individual has higher chances of finding a suitable partner for marriage early in life, and hence is expected to marry earlier than an otherwise similar...

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...

In order to respond to the social security needs of an increasingly aged population, many governments with limited budgets are required to focus available resources on the direct causes of people's anxieties about aging. This study investigated the causes of people's anxieties about life after...

Der Beitrag widmet sich den Sozialstrukturen und sozialen Beziehungen in Kleinstädten: Es werden die zentralen Begrifflichkeiten geklärt, ein Überblick über den bisherigen Forschungsstand gegeben sowie offene Fragen für die Kleinstadtforschung benannt. Der Beitrag zeigt auf, dass...

While interest in social determinants of individual behavior has led to a rich theoretical literature and many efforts to measure these influences, a mature social econometrics has yet to emerge. This chapter provides a critical overview of the identification of social interactions. We consider...

We present evidence on social incentives in the workplace, namely on whether workers' behavior is affected by the presence of those they are socially tied to, even in settings where there are no externalities among workers due to either the production technology or the compensation scheme in...

Our societies are heterogeneous in many dimensions such as census, education, religion, ethnic and cultural composition. The links between individuals - e.g. by friendship, marriage or collaboration - are not evenly distributed, but rather tend to be concentrated within the same group. This...

We examine how interaction choices depend on the interplay of social and physical distance, and show that agents who are more central in the social network, or are located closer to the geographic center of interaction, choose higher levels of interactions in equilibrium. As a result, the level...

We develop and analyze a tractable empirical model for strategic network formation that can be estimated with data from a single network at a single point in time. We model the network formation as a sequential process where in each period a single randomly selected pair of agents has the...

This paper empirically investigates the relevance of social interaction and caste affiliation for individual awareness of financial instruments and investment behavior in India. The results of our empirical analysis, which is based on a large scale survey on saving patterns of Indians, suggest a...