Peer effects might play an important role in complex financial decisions because many consumers lack experience with them and the costs of thinking through such decisions can be very high. We study peer effects in retirement savings, life insurance purchase, and two charitable giving programs in...

This paper presents a new theory of crime where leaders transmit a crime technology and act as a role model for other criminals. We show that, in equilibrium, an individual's crime effort and criminal decisions depend on the geodesic distance to the leader in his or her network of social...

Peer effects in education production functions are predominantly employed as the mean classroom performance. Based on sociological theory and using spatial regression techniques, I introduce social network matrices that correspond to a weighting scheme for peers within the class. In a spatial...

In many contexts we may be interested in understanding whether direct connections between agents, such as declared friendships in a classroom or family links in a rural village, affect their outcomes. In this paper we review the literature studying econometric methods for the analysis of social...

Consider the duration of stay of migrants in a host country. We propose a statistical model of locally interdependent return hazards in order to examine whether interactions at the level of the neighbourhood are present and lead to social multipliers. To estimate this model we develop and study...

We examine college students’ interaction within classrooms and estimate peer effects on their academic performance. We exploit a unique seating rule at a university in South Korea, known as the fixed-seat system. We propose a novel identification strategy based on students’ repeated...

This paper studies (nonparametric) partial identification of treatment response with social interactions. It imposes conditions motivated by economic theory on the primitives of the model, that is, the structural equations, and shows that they imply shape restrictions on the distribution of...

Most work on social interactions studies a single, composite effect of interactions within a group. Yet in the case of sexual initiation, there are two distinct social mechanisms-peer-group norms and partner availability-with separate effects and different potential interventions. Here I develop...

In many contexts we may be interested in understanding whether direct connections between agents, such as declared friendships in a classroom or family links in a rural village, affect their outcomes. In this paper, we review the literature studying econometric methods for the analysis of linear...

Job seekers can influence the arrival rate of job offers by the choice of search effort and the search methods they use. In this paper we empirically investigate the contribution of the use of different search methods on the outcome of search. Using unique data on the search behaviour of job...