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...

This paper investigates the determinants of job satisfaction in Italy with particular emphasis on social relations. Our econometric analysis is based on four waves (1993, 1995, 1998 and 2000) of the Multipurpose Household Survey conducted annually by the Italian Central Statistics Office. The...

It is generally believed that intergenerational coresidence by elderly parents and adult children provides security for parents in their old age. In many countries, such intergenerational coresidence is the most common living arrangement. Using a nationally-representative dataset and a program...

We provide the first empirical application of a new approach proposed by Lee (2007) to estimate peer effects in a linear-in-means model. This approach allows to control for group-level unobservables and to solve the reflection problem. We investigate peer effects in student achievement in...

This paper examines whether the chances of job placements improve if unemployed persons are counselled by caseworkers who belong to the same social group, defined by gender, age, education, and nationality. Based on an unusually informative dataset, which links Swiss unemployed to their...

We study jointly the health perception of the elderly and the care giving decision of their adult children. Social interactions play a crucial role: elder parents' health perception depends on relations with household members. On the other hand adult children make their care giving decisions...

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...

There is substantial empirical evidence showing that peer effects matter in many activities. The workhorse model in empirical work on peer effects is the linear-in-means (LIM) model, whereby it is assumed that agents are linearly affected by the mean action of their peers. We provide two...

We identify the dynamic effects of social distancing policy on reducing the transmission of the COVID-19 spread. We build a model that measures the relative frequency and geographic distribution of the virus growth rate and provides hypothetical infection distribution in the states that enacted...