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...

The identification problems of general peer effect models have been studied in depth. But cognitive achievement studies suffer two additional sources of bias that arise because the behavioral variable - student effort - is unobserved. This paper studies both sources of bias and analyzes the...

This paper develops a model that allows for heterogenous contemporaneous peer effects among different types of agents who are endogenously selected into different peer groups. Using our framework, we characterize the reduced-form coefficient in the peer effect literature and show that it is a...

This paper investigates the role of social influences in preferences for redistribution using data from the General Social Survey. We employ social interaction models with a socioeconomic network structure and intertemporal feedbacks during the impressionable years. We find substantial evidence...

This paper provides a method to study heterogenous social interactions in a large network. The method is based on a maximum score model with social interactions where the social interactions are modeled in a simultaneous discrete game. The heterogenous social interactions parameters are...

There has been a considerable amount of interest in the empirical investigation of social influence in the marketing and economics literature in the last decade or so. Among the many different empirical models applied for such investigations, the most common class of model is the linear-in-means...

Peer effects might play an important role in complex financial decisions because many consumers lack experience with them and the costs of thinking through such decisions can be very high. We study peer effects in retirement savings, life insurance purchase, and two charitable giving programs in...

Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in binary choice settings with social interactions. Examples...

This paper studies inference in models of discrete choice with social interactions when the data consists of a single large network. We provide theoretical justification for the use of spatial and network HAC variance estimators in applied work, the latter constructed by using network path...

This paper studies the importance of social interactions for the adoption of financial services among young adults. Specifically, we investigate whether, how, and why financial decisions among interacting agents are correlated. We exploit a unique dataset of friendship networks in the United...