Purpose: To investigate whether social interactions in friendship networks influence the following weight-related behaviors of adolescents: exercising regularly, playing an active sport, hours of TV/Video viewing, sleeping six or fewer hours, eating breakfast on weekdays, frequency of eating at...

There is a large literature that attempts to estimate the importance of peer effects for adolescent decision making, including alcohol consumption. There are several empirical difficulties in addressing this research question, including the endogeneity of peers, ‘third factors’ that affect...

It is recognized that public health interventions targeted towards changing lifestyle behaviors to reduce overweight is a considerable challenge. It is important that individuals recognize their overweight status to be a health risk in order for an effective change in lifestyle behaviors to...

We use life satisfaction and Body Mass Index (BMI) information from three waves of the SOEP to test for social interactions in BMI between spouses. Social interactions require that the cross-partial effect of partner’s weight and own weight in the utility function be positive. Using life...

This paper examines the existence of social interactions in malaria preventive behaviors in Sub-Saharan Africa, i.e. whether an individual’s social environment has an influence on the individual’s preventive behaviors. We focus on the two population groups which are the most vulnerable to...

We argue that sociological explanations proposed within the social capital framework to explain individual well-being are incomplete because they do not differentiate between interpersonal influence and selection mechanisms, on the one hand, and cognitive intra-personal processes on the other....

We employ a standard identification strategy from the peer effects literature to investigate the importance of network definitions in estimation of endogenous peer effects. We use detailed information on friends in the Adolescent Longitudinal Health Survey (Add Health) to construct two network...

Social interactions are widely recognized as critical in initiating many habit-forming processes, especially regarding substance use. Nevertheless, little attention has been given to the behavioral biases of individuals as a potential driving factor in such consumption. This paper presents a...

This paper examines the results of single-equation regression models of the determinants of alcohol consumption patterns among college students modelling a rich variety of covariates including gender, family and peer drinking, tenure, personality, risk perception, time preferences and age of...

We use anonymized and aggregated data from Facebook to show that areas with stronger social ties to two early COVID-19 “hotspots” (Westchester County, NY, in the U.S. and Lodi province in Italy) generally have more confirmed COVID-19 cases as of March 30, 2020. These relationships hold after...