This is the story of Miguel Angel de Quevedo, who pursued a career as an architect and an electric engineer before beeing elected as Mexico City alderman. This essay purporst to examine what might have been the begining of technocracy in late-nineteenth century Mexico.

Based on first-hand account, this paper offers evidence on price setting and price adjustment mechanisms that were illegally employed under the Soviet planning and rationing regime. The evidence is anecdotal, and is based on personal experience during the years 1960–1971 in the Republic of...

Because the demographic composition of todays immigrants to the US differs so much from those of natives, immigrants may be less likely to socially integrate into U.S. society, and specically less likely to marry natives. This paper explores the relationship between immigrants' marriage patterns...

There is a growing concern across the West that diversity (and immigration) has led to a decline in trust and social cohesion. In this working paper, which is based upon the core theoretical chapter of my book under contract to Cambridge University Press, Segregation and Mistrust, I argue that...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of persuasion bias, a form of bounded rationality whereby agents communicating through a social network are unable to account for repetitions in the information they receive. We find that, after repeated communication within a social network,...

We study the distribution and evolution of payments in a Pay-What-You-Want restaurant. Despite missing price tags and despite the option to pay nothing at all, we observe that the vast majority of guests makes strictly positive payments. Over the two years covered by our data, average payments...

This study investigates mechanisms of tie formation in an interorganizational network generated by the mobility of employees between organizations. We analyze a data set that contains information on all organizations in the Stockholm metropolitan area between 1990 and 2003. We show that the...

We examine theoretically and empirically social interactions in labor markets and how policy prescriptions can change dramatically when there are social interactions present. Spillover effects increase labor supply and conformity effects make labor supply perfectly inelastic at a reference group...

Social capital can be defined as the capacity of individuals or groups to obtain benefits by participating in social networks (Robinson, Siles and Schmid and, Flores and Rello in Atria and Siles eds. 2003). In this paper, we use data from the second round of the Panel of Low Income Households in...