Delegating the allocation of public resources to community members is an increasingly popular form of delivering development programs and are associated with a tradeoff between improved information about potential beneficiaries and favoritism towards local elites. Unlike targeting cash transfers...

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 study the relationship between information acquisition and trust in financial decision making. A field experiment with a variation of the trust game was conducted with the partners of a financial cooperative located in a Mexican rural area. Individuals who frequently visit friends are more...

This paper provides a theoretical framework of endogenous network formation that yields testable predictions for the network architectures generated by a particular informal institution common in village economies. We test the implications of the model on data from rural Ethiopia. In contrast to...

We examine how participation in a microfinance program diffuses through social networks. We collected detailed demographic and social network data in 43 villages in South India before microfinance was introduced in those villages and then tracked eventual participation. We exploit exogenous...

In this paper we test the implications of a model of network formation on data from rural Ethiopia. In contrast to the current literature, we demonstrate the critical role of both number of links and architecture in determining the impact of social networks on outcomes. Social capital matters,...

Economic anthropology is a contested area of interdisciplinary research. Although some practitioners define the task as the application of mainstream economic theorizing to the full range of human groups in time and space, many others argue in the light of the ethnographic evidence that it is...