This paper develops a search model with heterogeneous workers and social networks. High ability workers are more productive and have a larger number of professional contacts. Firms have a choice between a high cost vacancy in the regular labour market and a low cost job opening in the referral...

This paper represents the first application of a novel strategy to estimate peer effects in education in a developing country. It provides evidence on peer effects in standardized tests by exploiting a unique data set on social networks in Uruguayan primary schools. The identification method...

We study the existence of homophily (i.e. the tendency for people to make friends with people who are similar to themselves) with respect to trustworthiness. We ask whether two friends show similarly trustworthy behavior towards strangers, and whether this is anticipated by outsiders. We develop...

We survey the literature on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks. We develop a taxonomy of "macro" and "micro" characteristics of social interaction networks and discuss both the theoretical and empirical findings concerning the role of those characteristics in...