In rural economies, risk-sharing arrangements through networks of relatives and friends are common. Monitoring issues seem to impede the development of informal insurance mechanisms at higher level. As such, after a large and covariate shock, the prerequisites under which informal arrangements...

Con el objetivo de estudiar la asociación entre las características y los recursos de una red social y los hábitos financieros de sus miembros, aplicamos una encuesta en una comunidad académica acotada en la Ciudad de México. En consonancia con la literatura de redes y desarrollo...

We show that prominent centrality measures in network analysis are all based on additively separable and linear treatments of statistics that capture a node's position in the network. This enables us to provide a taxonomy of centrality measures that distills them to varying on two dimensions:...

I discuss economic and social sources of inequality and elaborate on the role of social networks in inequality, economic immobility, and economic inefficiencies. The lens of social networks clarifies how the entanglement of people's information, opportunities, and behaviors with those of their...

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,...

We study how communication platforms, or a society more generally, can improve social learning without censoring or fact-checking messages. We analyze learning as a function of social network depth (how many times information is relayed) and breadth (the number of relay chains accessed). Noise...

We present a new approach for the empirical investigation of agglomeration patterns. We examine the clustering of manufacturing firms by identifying patterns of spatial network formation that deviate from randomly generated networks. Using firm-level panel data from Vietnam we calculate...

I provide a typology of social capital, breaking it down into seven more fundamental forms of capital: information capital, brokerage capital, coordination and leadership capital, bridging capital, favor capital, reputation capital, and community capital. I discuss how most of these forms of...

Identifying the optimal set of individuals to first receive information (‘seeds') in a social network is a widely-studied question in many settings, such as diffusion of information, spread of microfinance programs, and adoption of new technologies. Numerous studies have proposed various...