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...

When people coordinate their behaviors with their friends---choosing whether to adopt a new technology, to protest against a government, to attend university, etc.---divisions within a social network can result in people adopting different conventions of behavior in different parts of the...

The 'friendship paradox' (Feld1991) refers to the fact that, on average, people have strictly fewer friends than their friends have. I show that this over-sampling of the most popular people amplifies behaviors that involve complementarities. People with more friends experience greater...

Can we identify highly central individuals in a network without collecting network data, simply by asking community members? Can seeding information via such nominated individuals lead to significantly wider diffusion than {choosing} randomly chosen people, or even respected ones? In two...

This paper considers the statistical analysis of large panel data sets where even after conditioning on common observed effects the cross section units might remain dependently distributed. This could arise when the cross section units are subject to unobserved common effects and/or if there are...

We develop and estimate a model of dynamic interactions where conmmitment is limited and contracts are incomplete to explain the patterns of income and consumption in village economies of less developped countries. Households can insure through both formal contracts and informal agreements, that...

We develop and estimate a model of dynamic interactions in which commitment is limited and contracts are incomplete to explain the patterns of income and consumption growth in village economies of less developed countries. Households can insure each other through both formal contracts and...

We develop and estimate a model of dynamic interactions where commitment is limited and contracts are incomplete to explain the patterns of income and consumption growth in village economies of less developed countries. Households can insure through both formal contracts and informal agreements,...

We develop and estimate a model of dynamic interactions in which commitment is limited and contracts are incomplete to explain the patterns of income and consumption growth in village economies of less developed countries. Households can insure each other through both formal contracts and...