Using friendship data from Facebook, we study the effects of three aspects of social capital on household financial behavior. We find that the most important measure of social capital in explaining stock market and saving participation is Economic Connectedness, defined as the fraction of one's...

Using panel household survey data from rural Ethiopia, we investigate informal risk sharing against health shocks in the presence of multiple risk sharing networks. We find that neither short-term nor long-term health shocks are insured through transfers from networks such as friends, neighbors,...

Community or interpersonal support as a critical source of livelihood sustenance in the Global South can exhibit unequal dynamics. An understanding of these practices is primarily tied to the conceptual space of poverty or small communities. Less is known about how social support systems might...

Using a new data on 590 Turkish households in Berlin, we investigate the determinants and impact of integration on economic performance. We find that usual suspects such as time spent in Germany and education have positive impact, while networks have no impact on integration. There is strong...

What do we know about the role of extended families and kinship networks for redistributing resources? What gaps in our knowledge most need to be filled? How can we best organize current work and identify priorities for future research? These questions are important for several reasons:...

Adoption of new services in the marketplace, and the impact that word of mouth has on adoption, has long been of interest to marketers. Managers have therefore become increasingly interested in measuring word-of-mouth activity most commonly through the recommend intention metric. The...

Researchers often assume household structure is exogenous, but child fostering, the institution in which parents send their biological children to live with another family, is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa and provides evidence against this assumption. Using data I collected in Burkina Faso,...

The influence of peer effects on the diffusion of innovations has been extensively studied. However, the underlying mechanisms of peer effects are generally understudied. Gaps in this knowledge could lead to misestimation of peer effects and inefficient interventions. This study examined the...