Mutual insurance has been shown, theoretically and empirically, to be incomplete and limited by asymmetric information and lack of enforcement mechanisms. While some research has shown that networks based on kinship, neighbourhood and ethnicity may provide a locus of insurance and thus a way of...

This paper is the first to analyze the impact of family background on permanent earnings based on sibling correlations in Germany and to provide a cross-country comparison of Germany, Denmark, and USA. The main findings are that family and community background has a stronger influence on...

We explore the relationship between connections and public transfers in decentralized poverty-targeting programmes. Using panel data from Vietnam we find evidence that households with connections to local government are more likely to be classified as poor, the main determinant of whether...

The tradition of keeping written records of gift received during household ceremonies in many countries offers researchers an underutilized means of data collection for social network analysis. This paper first summarizes unique features of the gift record data that circumvent five prevailing...

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

Using the 2011 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) database, we explore the heterogeneous impacts of social networks on informal financial inclusion for urban and rural households in the People's Republic of China. We find that social networks significantly increase the probability of...

Using the 2011 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) database, we explore the heterogeneous impacts of social networks on informal financial inclusion for urban and rural households in the PRC. We find that social networks significantly increase the probability of households' participation in...

This paper studies an evolutionary model of network formation with endogenous decay, in which agents benefit both from direct and indirect connections. In addition to forming (costly) links, agents choose actions for a coordination game that determines the level of decay of each link. We address...

This paper models the dynamic process through which a large society may succeed in building up its "social capital" by establishing a stable and dense pattern of interaction among its members. In the model, agents interact according to a collection of infinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemmas...

Empirical studies of labor markets show that social contacts are an important source of job-related information [Ioannides and Loury (2004)]. At the same time, wage differences among workers may be explained only in part by differences in individual background characteristics. Such findings...