Declining general trust has become a serious social issue in China in recent years. This paper attempts to understand and analyze this social phenomenon from a social interaction perspective. Based on a repeated prisoners ́dilemma game on networks, it finds that the evolution of general trust...

The past decade has witnessed a surge of interest in the economic analysis of networks. This chapter is concerned with the role played by labor and credit networks in shaping economic activity in developing countries. The problem of identifying network effects on economic outcomes is first...

Informal systems of relationships may be the most appropriate unit of analysis for understanding the patterns of development of many aspects of corruption, organized crime, markets, and the state. The lack of attention to informal systems can produce unanticipated and undesired outcomes in...

Delegating the allocation of public resources to community members is an increasingly popular form of delivering development programs and are associated with a tradeoff between improved information about potential beneficiaries and favoritism towards local elites. Unlike targeting cash transfers...

This paper considers the formation of risk-sharing networks. Following empirical findings, we build a model where risk-sharing takes place between pairs of individuals. We ask what structures emerge when pairs can agree to form links, but people cannot coordinate links across a population. We...

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:...

Recent Eurobarometer survey data are used to document and explain the stock of social capital in 27 European countries. Social capital in Central and Eastern Europe - measured by civic participation and access to social networks - lags behind that in Western European countries. Using regression...

This paper examines the existence of social learning in agriculture in Ethiopia. We use a ‘random matching within sample' technique to collect data on social networks and elicit details of the relationships and information exchange between network members, complementing the analysis with...

Introduction and Aims Entrepreneurship and the business environment, in general, are being influenced by the existence of formal and informal institutions. This study focuses on the negative versus positive perceptions of Moroccan, Chinese, and German entrepreneurs to formal and informal...

We explain persistent differences in cultural traits of immigrant groups with the presence of community leaders. Leaders influence the cultural traits of their community, which have an impact on the group's earnings. They determine whether a community will be more assimilated and wealthier or...