This paper studies the decision made by a family to invest in student migration. We propose an empirical structural decision model which reflects the importance of both the return to the investment and the budgetary constraint in the choice of the family. We circumvent the problem of endogeneity...

This paper proposes a tractable model that allows us to analyze how agents' perception of relationships with others determines the structures of networks. In our model, agents are endowed with their own multidimensional characteristics and their payoffs depend on the social distance between...

This article argues that abstract knowledge in the form of formally developed theory plays an increasingly important role in the economy and in financial innovation in particular. Abstract knowledge is easily reified, and this is an aspect of knowledge work that is insufficiently researched. In...

Health research on personal social capital has often utilized measures of respondents' perceived trust of others as either a proxy for one's social capital in the absence of more focused measures or as a subjective component of social capital. Little empirical work has evaluated the validity of...

This chapter reviews the literature identifying the different roles that family and kinship networks play in sharing risk. After a brief overview of efficient risk sharing, we discuss the channels by which households pool risk and the motives for entering in binding informal arrangements....

While interest in social determinants of individual behavior has led to a rich theoretical literature and many efforts to measure these influences, a mature social econometrics has yet to emerge. This chapter provides a critical overview of the identification of social interactions. We consider...