We study the consequences of job markets' heavy reliance on referrals. Referrals screen candidates and lead to better matches and increased productivity, but disadvantage job-seekers who have few or no connections to employed workers, leading to increased inequality. Coupled with homophily,...

The 'friendship paradox' (Feld1991) refers to the fact that, on average, people have strictly fewer friends than their friends have. I show that this over-sampling of the most popular people amplifies behaviors that involve complementarities. People with more friends experience greater...

The paper analyses the effect of interest rate changes on education and child labor in an economy with a high-skilled sector, a low-skilled sector and fragmented credit markets. The high-skilled sector takes educated labor as input. The low-skilled sector takes unskilled labor, physical capital...

This paper analyzes the implications of alternative ways to model decision making by families for educational policy. We show that many of the policy implications associated with credit constraints cannot be distinguished from the implications of models of the family that differ from the...

In this paper we examine possible network formations among immigrants and natives with endogenous investment. We consider a model of a network formation where the initiator of the link bears its cost while both agents benefit from it. We present the model by considering possible interactions...

Information asymmetry is a necessary prerequisite for testing adverse selection. This paper applies this sequence of tests to Mauritian slave auctions. Dynamic auction theory with private value highlights more aggressive bidding by uninformed bidders and higher prices when an informed...

Liquidity may be a serious challenge to growing nations especially in the absence of foreign aid or other necessary assistance like access to borrowing. This paper introduces the Invisible Reserves Theory which states that, “A country that is locked in a depression during the absence of...

This paper sought to outline mechanisms for selecting high quality leaders into public office having identified the failure of political leadership as the bane of economic development and democracy in Africa. In the first stage of the screening process, certain elements of costs are imposed on...

Increasingly both donor agencies and recipient governments want to assess the effectiveness of aid. Unfortunately, existing methods for impact evaluation are designed for the evaluation of homogeneous interventions ('projects') where those with and without 'treatment' can be compared. However,...

We develop a model where information about jobs is essentially obtained through friends and relatives, i.e. strong and weak ties. Workers commute to a business center to work and to interact with other people. We find that housing prices increase with the level of social interactions in the city...