We study peer effects in crime by analyzing co-offending networks. We first provide a credible estimate of peer effects in these networks equal to 0.17. This estimate implies a social multiplier of 1.2 for those individuals linked to only one co-offender and a social multiplier of 2 for those...

We investigate whether peer effects at work differ by gender and whether the gender difference in peer effects if any depends on work organization, precisely the structure of social networks. We develop a social network model with gender heterogeneity that we test by means of a real-effort...

We develop and estimate a model of study time choices of students on a social network. The model is designed to exploit unique data collected in the Berea Panel Study. Study time data allow us to quantify an intuitive mechanism for academic social interactions: own study time may depend on...

This paper studies peer effects on the use of essential health care services offered by a microfinance institution in impoverished neighborhoods in the Philippines. I apply a novel IV identification strategy to overcome the well-known challenges in the estimation of peer effects in...

Sexual activity among adolescents is associated with risks such as pregnancy and STDs, and there is substantial policy interest in how peers influence the timing of sexual initiation. This paper measures separate effects for two social mechanisms--peer-group norms and partner availability--using...

We study the influence of family members, neighbors and coworkers on retirement behavior. To estimate causal retirement spillovers between individuals, we exploit a pension reform in the Netherlands that creates exogenous variation in peers' retirement ages, and we use administrative data on the...

Peer influence on effort devoted to some activity is often studied using proxy variables when actual effort is unobserved. For instance, in education, academic effort is often proxied by GPA. We propose an alternative approach that circumvents this approximation. Our framework distinguishes...

Can large-scale peer interaction foster entrepreneurship and innovation? We conducted an RCT involving almost 5,000 entrepreneurs from 49 African countries. All were enrolled in an online business course, and the treatment involved random assignment to either face-to-face or virtual...

We review an empirical literature that studies the role of social interactions in driving economic and financial decision making. We first summarize recent work that documents an important role of social interactions in explaining household decisions in housing and mortgage markets. This...

We explore how social network exposure to COVID-19 cases shapes individuals’ social distancing behavior during the early months of the ongoing pandemic. We work with de-identified data from Facebook to show that U.S. users whose friends live in areas with worse coronavirus outbreaks reduce...